"The time for national unity is now finally over"

During the corona crisis, the parties in the Riksdag essentially buried the battle ax and repeatedly emphasized the importance of joint action in a difficult crisis.

More recently, there have been several signs of change. The criticism of the government has gradually intensified from the opposition parties in the Riksdag. Sunday's party leadership debate became a clear illustration of the fact that national unity is now over.

The strongest was the criticism from the Swedish Democrats party leader Jimmie Åkesson and the Christian Democrats party leader Ebba Busch. But somewhat ominous to the government, there was a fairly broad consensus among the opposition parties against important parts of the crisis measures. Above all, the inability to get extensive corona testing started in Sweden.

SD leader Jimmie Åkesson said that the time is now ripe to break the bail and demand political responsibility. He accused the government of several misjudgments that led to high death rates in Sweden.

KD leader Ebba Busch claimed that there was no political leadership during the crisis and that the government is "dysfunctional". The strategy to protect risk groups has failed and the government has "with due courage" allowed the spread of infection that has occurred in Sweden, the KD leader stated. An extremely harsh statement in a party leadership debate.

So there were several frantic attacks from the opposition in the debate. Other party leaders also criticized the government. The Left Party's Jonas Sjöstedt talked about the testing as "a failure" and the Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson believed that the government had failed in both responsibility and clarity.

Unexpectedly, both Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and the Environment Party's speech tube Per Bolund tried to defend the government's strategy. It is too early to draw certain conclusions, the crisis is still ongoing, Per Bolund said. Stefan Löfven maintained that the Swedish strategy worked, but admitted that too few have been tested.

Precisely the testing became the subject of extensive debate and again it became clear how unclear the relationship between responsibilities is between state and regions. Now the government hopes to finally be able to scale up the testing through a new billion investment, which was presented at the end of last week. So far, the government's number of 100,000 tests a week has not been achieved. Instead, it has become at most 35,000 weeks per week.

When the debate turned to finance and jobs, the level of conflict between the party leaders was lowered. Not surprising given that several of the crisis packages presented have been supported by the opposition. However, the moderates and Christian Democrats pushed on in the debate to extend the support paid to the companies. However, whether it is possible to create a majority in the Riksdag for continued transition support is unclear.

During this part of the debate, it sometimes sounded like the government's two support parties, the Center Party and the Liberals, have more in common with the opposition on the right than the government they are cooperating with. This in itself is not unexpected. The old alliance parties are fairly close to each other in economic-political issues.