Akesson expects permanent residence permits to be turned into temporary ones after the election - "not all of them, but a good many"
In Sveriges Radio's party-leader interrogation on Tuesday, Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson said he stands by the plan to convert existing permanent residence permits into temporary ones after the September election, if his side wins. Not all of them could be converted, he said, but a good many could.
His reasoning, as he put it, is that a permanent permit amounts to a kind of citizenship without the obligations that citizenship carries, and that he does not regard this as reasonable. In the same interview he said that if it were up to him the state would spend exactly zero kronor on integration, which he described as a matter of individual responsibility rather than public spending.
Around 185,000 people in Sweden hold a permanent residence permit. The government inquiry behind the proposal would make it the main rule that a permit covered by the new law is withdrawn and replaced with a time-limited one. It would apply to refugees, people with alternative protection status, quota refugees, long-term residents, and people granted a permit on exceptionally distressing grounds, as well as family members of those groups. Where no time-limited permit can be granted instead, the inquiry's starting point is that the person no longer has the right to remain in Sweden.
The exception is the part worth knowing about. The inquiry proposes that a permanent permit is not withdrawn from someone who has already begun a citizenship application within a set period. Pushing more permit holders to apply for citizenship is the stated purpose of the whole exercise.
None of this is law yet. It is a proposal in an election campaign, and it is disputed inside the governing bloc itself. The Liberal leader has said her party will not vote for it, while Akesson maintains the four cooperating parties agree on the direction and expects a fresh negotiation on how it would be carried out. He added that he foresees no major further asylum reforms in the next term, describing Sweden's rules as probably already the most restrictive in Europe.