As someone who has experienced life threatening practices due to sudden changes in politics, I get sad when people claim that “all politicians are the same” or that it doesn’t matter who you vote for.
I live in Sweden, a country long known for its successful mixture of capitalism and democratic socialism. Here, every working citizen (still) has a guaranteed health insurance. If you get sick you can still pay your rent instead of being homeless, adding more bills to the community through increased use of free public health care, more emergency calls, police investigations etc. If your pay was any good you can even live relatively comfortably, at least for a year or two, depending on your standards before you got sick. And if your health doesn’t improve, you can go in to early retirement even from a very young age, and live a minimalistic but safe life.
As wonderful as all this might sound to an American, these rights have always been under attack by conservatives who value the right to ownership more than the right to life, safety, housing etc for the poor. Swedish worker rights and rights for the poor was bought with the deaths of thousands and protests from hundreds of thousands of desperate people from when conservatives used the military on protesting workers in the 1930s. Those murders finally plunged Sweden into a totally different society. Before, conservative parties and large companies would just fire, mistreat or kill anyone who demanded a raise or some time off.
The result became a state run by the Social Democratic Party (S for short). And it flourished on the world market for many decades. But the attacks from the right never stopped, and in the 90’s (Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986) they took a more unforgiving turn. Even S joined the conservative choir in some ways.
2006, a right wing conglomerate of conservative parties called “The Alliance” won the election and the old social democratic system was fiercely disassembled. Since then, Swedish inequality has been on the rise, peaking during Covid.
As the attacks on the sick grew in 2008, with 65000 sick thrown out of their health insurance system, (article in Swedish) a party based on Nazism in -88 made a quick rise to power. As more and more people realized that their safety in the old system was gone, they followed the historic rule of blaming their old masters and new minorities, preferably social democrats, unions and Muslims. Today, the Nazi/fascist based party SD alternate between being the largest or second largest on the right, while the conservatives who invited them to share the power struggle to survive.
Health care policies is overshadowed by new or revised laws allegedly aimed at organized crime: live surveillance with facial recognition through pre-existing cameras like traffic cameras, (racial) profiling, the “right” for almost any authority figure to check your biometrical ID, surveillance of phones and apps without clear suspicion of a crime, and so on.
From both traditional media and internet right wing media, majority Swedes need not think twice about who’s the cause of the declining system. While stats show clearly that the rise in inequality and stress is closely connected to the enormous sale and privatization of public companies, pensions, schools, hospitals, health- and elderly care, transport etc, while there’s a surge in profits for the rich and a laisse faire attitude towards their avoidance of taxes.
The stats in the picture depict the rise in suicidal “threats” made to agents at the stately health insurance agency as the new policies was applied. Numbers of actual suicides following these threats are impossible to come by, which is strange for a country that is also known for keeping stats on everything concerning the people. Such stats are unwanted in conservative societies. In 2007, The Alliance canceled funding to ALI (Arbetslivsinstitutet), a center that performed and collected research, especially on stress related illnesses in the workplace. With the aim to create more liveable lives for us all.
Try to remember some of this when someone starts dreaming aloud of having Swedish worker rights and healthcare for all. Never drop the ball, the opposition is relentless. And it all is very political.
Sources in English
Rise in inequality: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(23)00028-5/fulltext
The Sweden Democrats: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/sweden-democrats-elections.html
Source in Swedish
The story behind the stats in the picture: https://arbetet.se/2012/04/27/stark-okning-av-hot-om-sjalvmord/