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“Everybody needs to do more. It’s up to you and me,” Stefan Löfven said in Sunday’s speech to the nation against a background of Swedish flags and an EU flag. “Cancel. Cancel. Postpone, ”he urged in a serious talk of encouragement about the crisis.
Speeches to the nation are very unusual in Sweden. Göran Persson held one after the assassinations of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh and Carl Bildt when the man with the laser wreaked havoc, but then the solemn TV speeches ended until this spring.
Then Stefan Löfven addressed people for the first time in prime time. The speech was a balancing act between, on the one hand, making viewers trust the wisdom of the authorities, and, on the other, convincing everyone that they must change their lives.
The Swedish model of pandemic control was internationally prominent, as demonstrated by the cooperation organization of industrialized democratic countries OECD in a recent report.
Sweden abstained, unlike the other countries of coercive measures such as the closure of restaurants, shops, schools and curfews. Instead, voluntariness and expert government were emphasized. But this was not as effective as other countries ‘blocking’ people from staying at home, the report shows.
It took European countries an average of 34 days to control the first wave of the pandemic. In Sweden, it took 58 days, the longest of all the countries compared.
In the spring, the government said it was wrong to compare with other countries, because Sweden would cope with the continuation of the pandemic better than others. We would have achieved greater immunity and we would have been more persistent. Now we are again the most affected in Scandinavia with relatively more hospitalized and more deaths, although there are countries in southern Europe that have been even more affected.
But the Prime Minister did not criticize himself. “We know how to flatten the infection spread curve. We have done it before. We did it this spring, “the prime minister said in his speech. The spring was a role model, now people are more careless, according to the prime minister’s message.
In the midst of an acute crisis, it may not be the best time to study old mistakes. But if you can learn any of them that are useful during this second wave, it may still be worth it.
This fall, Stefan Löfven’s baptism of fire is shaping up to be a political leader. He is already the prime minister who has led the country through the most dramatic crises of all time since the war, with pandemics, refugee crises, terrorist attacks and looming government crises. This time it will be even more difficult. He has lost authority since last spring, the opposition is not behind him in the same way, and his crisis management in the spring looks increasingly like a failure.
Now you have to involve people in implementing a Swedish variant of closure by voluntarily staying home. Otherwise, the government may have to give more consideration to the kinds of measures it so emphatically rejected this spring.
