After just a few months of Trump II, northern Europe is gradually coming to terms with the returning President’s dramatic revision of U.S. foreign policy. Denmark is a partial exception, as a result of the American administration’s astonishingly aggressive approach towards Greenland, which is still part of the Danish realm. Danes are boiling with fury. Britain and Sweden, the countries that I know best, are more typical.

Despite their very different security backgrounds, the two countries have ended up in similar positions: both feel obliged to make the best of an exceedingly bad job. Their governments have adopted accommodating – even obsequious – positions toward an administration that they find deeply unsettling. The reason is simple. In the short to medium term, countries like Britain and Sweden have no other realistic security option.

Under the American umbrella

In 2022, soon after the major Russian attack on Ukraine, Sweden’s then Social Democratic government implemented a huge change in the country’s security strategy. After 200 years of neutrality or nonalignment, Sweden applied to join NATO. This was not an obvious or inevitable step. The outbreak of interstate conflict in its vicinity might conceivably have persuaded a nonaligned country to accentuate its independence from power blocs.

However, Finland’s decision to dash for NATO membership might have left Sweden isolated, had it not chosen to follow suit. In any case, Sweden’s nonalignment had been eroding since the end of the Cold War (and arguably even earlier) as it drew closer to NATO. By 2022, a credible neutrality had probably become irrecoverable.

Finland’s accession to the alliance went quickly and smoothly. For Sweden, Turkish and Hungarian obstruction made the same path much rockier than expected. But it was completed in March 2024, much to the relief of the entire Swedish political class, even including two left-wing parties that remained halfheartedly sceptical of the alliance.

For sure, NATO’s European members had expected relations with the United States to get bumpier once Trump won the 2024 presidential election. No one had missed his campaign pledge to make NATO’s security insurance conditional on its members’ payment of what he considered sufficiently high premiums. But they were unprepared for the triple shock that Trump delivered to Europe in February 2025: his overtures to Russia; his defense secretary’s public disavowal of Ukraine’s path to NATO membership (which the previous administration had said was “irreversible”); and his Vice President’s startling polemic about oppressive European political elites.

Since his return to the presidency, Trump has not publicly suggested that America’s commitment to its NATO obligation is in doubt. Nevertheless, given their experience, some Europeans believe the worst. To them, the triple shock undercut the very basis of European security since the end of the Cold War, perhaps since the end of World War II.

The lenses of history – and geopolitics

This shock was felt more keenly in some European countries than in others, partly due to varying attitudes toward the war in Ukraine. Every European democracy shares the view that Russia is the aggressor and that Ukrainian sovereignty must be preserved. Still, some have advocated these positions with far greater intensity than others.

Britain and Sweden have adopted stridently anti-Russia stances. National elites in the fields of politics and policy, as well as the media, share a near-consensus view: the only important reason for the war is Russian imperialism. In both countries, there has been very little space for any more nuanced view of what lies behind the conflict.

As the economic historian Robert Skidelsky has written, British antipathy to Russia has deep roots, running through the 1853–56 Crimean War, the “Great Game” over Central Asia played during much of the 19th century and, of course, the Cold War. It is only a slight exaggeration to assert that the British elite has interpreted the Ukrainian tragedy as a reenactment of the Second World War. That conflict, as we all know, ended in victory for Britain and its allies against an expansionist continental tyranny – a triumph that did so much to shape the modern British self-image.

The implicit or explicit equation of contemporary Russia with Nazi Germany has, in turn, engendered the assumption, frequently articulated by British ministers and officials and never challenged by media interviewers, that Russia – or rather “Putin,” as the aggressor is often personified – will pursue a broader offensive against the rest of Europe unless it is stopped in Ukraine. This view draws on a supposed lesson from history about the “appeasement” of aggressors. It is almost universally believed in Britain that concessions made to Hitler in Munich in 1938 by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were a disastrous mistake: they induced, rather than prevented, the subsequent war in Europe.

For Sweden, meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine taps into a deep-seated “rysskräck,” fear of the Russian, which stretches even further back into history. Finland, which had previously been an integral part of the Swedish kingdom, was conquered by Russia in 1809 following fierce battles on what is modern Swedish territory.

This fear is easily discernible in public discussions. Despite a strong norm in Sweden against associating groups of people with generalized character traits, it is common to hear speakers from Swedish research institutes and think tanks refer to what Russians “are really like,” as if their behaviour is somehow congenital. “Putin’s Russia is not a historical anomaly, but rather a continuation of over 500 years of Russian expansionism,” wrote one leading commentator, now a government adviser, in the newspaper Expressen in 2022. Concessions to Russia are pointless, declared an analyst recently in Svenska Dagbladet, because it “will never be satisfied. It only brings forth even more Russian expansionism and imperialism.”

This overwhelmingly anti-Russian attitude has stretched across the political spectrum of both the U.K. and Sweden. The Sweden Democrats, a national-conservative party that props up the current centre-right Swedish government, have expunged the few even vaguely pro-Russian voices that could be heard among their members before 2022. Nigel Farage, the mercurial populist whose latest party vehicle, Reform UK, currently threatens to reshape the British political landscape, did suggest, during the national election campaign in the summer of 2024, that NATO might be partially culpable for the war because of its expansion eastward. He was furiously criticized and has not said anything similar since.

For nearly three years after the invasion of 2022, this maximalist anti-Russian stance felt costless for British, Swedish and many other European politicians. They never thought that Europe would have to take serious responsibility for the war, either through winning it or through agreeing to some compromise with Russia. No serious sacrifice, beyond weapons shipments to Ukraine, would be required of them. Their armed forces would not have to actually fight the Russians. That could be left to the Ukrainians – and in time, maybe the Americans too.

Indeed, the unspoken assumption in much of Europe was that the United States would, in the end, ride to Ukraine’s rescue. Deep down, Europeans felt sure that, to use Churchill’s famous but probably apocryphal aphorism, the Americans would eventually do the right thing once they had exhausted all alternatives. For elites in hardline countries like Britain and Sweden, then, the moral high ground seemed a secure place on which to build permanent rhetorical encampments.

Yet both governments set a trap for themselves. More clear-sighted politicians would have understood that, sooner or later, America was likely to seek a deal with Russia. Even before Russia’s abortive attempt to conquer Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration made it abundantly clear that – given the possibility of nuclear escalation – it did not see American national interests as sufficiently threatened by the impending invasion that the United States was prepared to risk direct conflict with Russia.

That Trump II has retained and clarified this American position, albeit rather brutally, should not have surprised Britain, Sweden and other European countries. Yet it did surprise them. European elites were abruptly faced with the difficult task of having to roll back their previous uncompromising rhetoric about the war. In a sense, Trump pulled the rug out from under them. Britain, in particular, was left trying to save face by orchestrating some European peacekeeping force, a “coalition of the willing,” in Ukraine. The British duly edged away from that idea as its implausibility became apparent. Britain and others now echo America’s calls for ceasefires rather than a full Ukrainian victory, which itself represents a major shift.

Navigating the blame game

 For European countries like Britain and Sweden, this U-turn has been painful and embarrassing. Both have been sidelined as the United States has talked directly to Russia. Trump has shone a merciless spotlight on the profound imbalance in the transatlantic relationship (which may well have been the calculated intention behind the triple shock of February 2025). It has thoroughly exposed Europe’s security dependency on the United States. Researchers at one think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, refer to Europe’s “vassalisation.”

So far, however, the domestic political costs of these setbacks for European governments have not been great. While their electorates are in a furiously anti-elitist mood, most voters, particularly in northern Europe, remain hostile to Trump for his tariff obsession. His break with decades of free trade in Europe threatens to wreak considerable damage on European economies.

Swedish elite opinion is vehemently anti-Trump. Right- and left-leaning newspapers alike decry his administration’s every move. One columnist in the centre-right Svenska Dagbladet has argued that an authoritarian regime has been installed in Washington.

Elites in Britain are similarly hostile to Trump. The Liberal Democrats, a centre-left opposition party, are seeking to mine a variant of Trump aversion among middle-class voters. When the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, brandished a handwritten invitation to the President from King Charles in front of the media in the Oval Office in late February, it was regarded by some left-leaning commentators as a mild form of national humiliation. The leaders of both right-wing opposition parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, were critical of the trade deal that Starmer’s government reached with the United States in early May, when Starmer heaped yet more cloying praise on the President. Farage has stopped talking about his friendship with Trump.

British and Swedish governments, however, have been far more circumspect. Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson both hail from the Moderate Party, which dominates the centre-right coalition. This party has strongly favoured Swedish NATO membership for many years. It would be very hard for it to change tack now, only a year after it finally attained that goal. Malmer Stenergard was critical of the United States when Trump first initiated negotiations with Russia, but she and Kristersson have otherwise been very restrained in their comments. The same applies to the opposition Social Democrats, who seek to avoid burning bridges when they may be only 15 months or so from a return to office.

The British government, meanwhile, has sounded even more desperate to avoid friction with the U.S. administration. David Lammy, who became foreign secretary in 2024, referred to Trump as recently as 2019 as a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” – only one among many spectacularly critical remarks. These are now completely forgotten. Lammy is today supposedly great mates, to use the British idiom, with Vice President Vance. When Trump’s allied oligarch Elon Musk publicly accused British ministers of covering up dreadful crimes, he provoked little more than stoic silence in response.

What else can these governments do? For now, not much.

Both Britain and Sweden are rapidly increasing their spending on defence. If maintained over a decade, this would presumably reduce their dependence on America. In the short term, the aim is to signal a break with Europeans’ supposed free-riding and thus persuade Trump to keep America engaged in Europe. Other longer-term security options are being publicly discussed in Sweden. A Nordic nuclear deterrent has even been mooted, although that remains extremely far-fetched. It seems quite likely that Swedish elites will agree to offset the prospect of American disengagement by more fully committing to the European Union’s core, although that option enjoys only lukewarm public support.

A full turn to Europe is not an option for Britain. Over many decades, the British elite convinced itself that the country’s influence in the world should be pursued and cemented mainly through its famous “special relationship” with the United States. That was no less true when Britain was a member of the EU, from 1973 to 2020, as it has been since Brexit. Even Britain’s own nuclear deterrent, its eye-wateringly expensive, submarine-based Trident system, is reliant on American supplies and maintenance. British elites can hardly bear to think about the end of the special relationship because Britain, in their eyes, would be suddenly, sorely diminished. If this is the path down which Britain is now travelling, that new reality would take years for the country to process.

Pictured: Magdalena Andersson. Via Frankie Fouganthin, Wikipedia Commons.

Things appear to be looking up for social democracy in northern Europe. Four of the five Nordic countries are now led by the traditional centre-left. Sweden, where the political wing of the labour movement dominated politics for much of the 20th century, has had a Social Democratic Prime Minister since 2014. It has just got another one. In replacing the retiring Stefan Löfven, Magdalena Andersson is the second woman to lead the party – and the first to lead Sweden.

The northern revival confirms the enduring relevance of European social democracy. Still, that revival should not be overstated. Every current Nordic prime minister relies on support from both within and beyond the left to fill out a parliamentary majority. Such heterogeneous support can pull a party in all sorts of uncomfortable directions.

Sweden offers the clearest example of these political contortions. Löfven ran consecutive minority coalitions of his Social Democrats and the small Green Party. That in itself was occasionally testing; the Social Democrats were not entirely heartbroken when the Greens opted against joining Andersson’s new government, while still supporting it in parliament. Much more difficult, though, had been the need for the coalition to strike legislative deals with liberal parties – and, concurrently, to maintain the compliance of an increasingly disgruntled radical-left party. This balancing act very nearly collapsed in the summer. The government’s parliamentary majority is now as thin and precarious as it
could possibly be.

Nor did the political contradictions end with a change of prime minister. In fact, they induced a day of political surrealism. The Greens’ departure from government was triggered – so they claimed, anyway – by parliament’s adopting the right-wing opposition’s budget, just hours after the same parliament had approved Andersson as prime minister. (One of the liberal parties, having painted itself into various corners, abstained on both votes. Because the decisions were subject to different voting rules, this created two different parliamentary majorities – one including the Social Democrats, one against them.) The Greens’ unexpected decision forced Andersson to resign immediately as Prime Minister–designate and endure a new vote of investiture a few days later.

Finally ensconced in office, Andersson’s intention then was simply to put up with working according to the opposition’s budget. It was hardly an auspicious start to her time in charge.

The parliamentary election next September will constitute a still more profound test. Opinion polls point to a tight race. The Social Democrats will want the campaign to revolve around the economy. They will snipe at the established opposition parties’ detente with the far right. The opposition, meanwhile, will seek to drag attention to law and order – and it is not hard to see why. Violent conflict between criminals in Sweden has reached drastic levels. Deaths by shooting have risen far above the European average.¹

The challenges from opponents and the demands of allies would be enough to cause any Social Democratic leader some serious headaches. How will Andersson address them? In what direction will she seek to take her party? The answers to such questions are supremely unclear. And that might turn out to be her biggest problem.

The end of (Social Democratic) history?

Who is Magdalena Andersson? Over seven years as Sweden’s Finance Minister, she has acquired a reputation as a clever, tough
and rather prickly custodian of the nation’s accounts. Journalists relate that she does not suffer fools gladly.

Yet little is known about her political skills. She has been an active Social Democrat since school, but her career, which tempted her away from doctoral research, has involved a succession of advisory and administrative roles within the party and its governments. She had stints at a think tank and at the Swedish Tax Agency. Before she became Finance Minister, she was more a “policy professional” than a politician. In fact, she has no real experience of elected public office. She did win a parliamentary seat in 2014, but immediately passed it to a substitute when she joined the government, in accordance with Swedish practice. She is certainly not much of an orator.

It might seem odd that Sweden, and its Social Democratic Party, are about to get a leader who has barely been involved in electoral or parliamentary politics. It is surely even odder that the country and party will be getting their second such leader in a row.

Before he shouldered the burden of political leadership, Löfven was a trade union boss. Most Swedish unions still enjoy close ties to Social Democracy, and his status helped him onto the party’s executive committee. After the Social Democrats descended into their worst-ever crisis in 2011–12, over how to deal with a disastrous choice of leader just a few months before, Löfven succumbed to the blandishments of his party colleagues and agreed to step in as replacement. He was not their first choice. One and possibly two former cabinet ministers, both of whom had left politics some years before, reportedly first declined the job. What all three had in common was that they had no known views on any contemporary political issues.

Löfven was, in other words, a neutral figure, a classic caretaker. The caretaker then led his party to power. How did he do it? By sitting still in – i.e. not rocking – the boat, to use a Swedish expression. Circumstances were favourable: the centre-right opposition was and remains fatally split over whether it can work with the far right in parliament.

In a way, the Löfven years have been good for Swedish Social Democracy. The party’s vote has declined, yes. After winning over 45 per cent in the 1994 election and nearly 40 per cent as recently as 2002, it took 28 per cent in 2018 and is currently polling below that level. But pretty much all the old mass parties of continental Europe have suffered electoral decline. The Social Democrats have held onto power and remained central to Swedish politics. They have offered Swedish voters stability. A good number have appreciated that.

Still, like any good thing, stability can come in excess. The Swedish media have not fully appreciated the intellectual stasis that has beset the Social Democrats. For sure, it would have been unreasonable to expect radical, transformative policy projects from weak minority governments. Yet there has been no serious policy initiative of any type from the party through Löfven’s entire tenure. Its only substantial proposal before the 2018 election, an extra week of paid holiday for families with children, has not yet been implemented. No other party on the left sees it as a priority. Even Social Democrats seem halfhearted about it.

Then again, they seem halfhearted about most policy questions these days. A long list of piecemeal measures to combat criminal violence, including moderately enhanced police powers and slightly tougher prison sentences, was presented in 2019.² Laws have been changed since, but often at a snail’s pace. There is little sense of anyone in government really driving the initiative and staking a reputation on its success.

Crisis management, meanwhile, has largely been farmed out to public agencies. A necessary condition for Sweden’s idiosyncratic response to the COVID-19 pandemic was that Löfven’s government ceded almost complete control to a handful of bureaucrats in the Public Health Agency, who happened to take rather eccentric positions.³

The row, about rent control, that nearly brought down the government in June pitched two of its support parties, a liberal one and the radical-left one, against each other. The liberal party had previously been involved in a dispute about labour-market rules, which employers and unions eventually resolved. The same party picked yet another fight, this one with the Greens, about building regulation. Immigration, still Sweden’s most sensitive issue, was finally reformed this past spring, just before a temporary law expired, but only after tortuous negotiations between the four supposed allies in the parliamentary majority. (Among other measures, the residence permits granted to refugees will normally be temporary rather than permanent. It may also become easier for certain migrants who are already in Sweden to stay, although exactly how the law will work in practice remains uncertain.)

In all these episodes, the Social Democrats, a party that is much bigger than its allies put together, acted like an arbitration service. It was as if they had no preferences of their own – other than on the need for compromise to preserve their parliamentary majority. The substantive content of the compromises seemed unimportant.

Parties’ primary interest, some political scientists say, has come to be in governing rather than in representing a particular segment of the electorate or in changing society in any particular direction. If the thesis is correct, the Swedish Social Democrats exemplify it. But how long can they continue down this path? It is hard to envisage exciting prospects for such a depoliticized political party.

A peculiar and fascinating method of choosing a leader

Could things now change? Could Andersson revive her party’s interest in policy? The Social Democrats’ own institutions complicate that task, notably in the party’s method of choosing a leader, which is peculiar and fascinating. A small committee – known as a valberedning – runs the process. Put simply, its job is to channel and conceal the internal competition that inevitably surrounds its decision. The committee will discuss the vacancy with regional branches, parliamentarians and affiliated trade unions. Meanwhile, no aspiring leader will mount anything like a personal leadership campaign, or even acknowledge being a candidate. Indeed, such an acknowledgement would immediately scupper the aspirant’s chances. The conceit is that the committee calls a certain individual to the role of leader. If the individual humbly accepts the invitation, the party congress confirms the appointment.

The system has its merits. No political organization enjoys advertising its internal disagreements to the outside world; there are good reasons for a party to try to avoid doing so. The Social Democrats’ valberedning, moreover, is less a unitary actor than a forum in which sections of the party bargain with one another. The valberedning cannot just disregard the preferences of the congress delegates. Rather, it must discern and anticipate those preferences. Failure to do so would risk, in extremis, a rebellion in the congress – a debacle that has occasionally occurred in other Swedish parties.

Like any selection method, however, this one has its downsides – and one of them may be particularly awkward for the party now. This problem is related to a new leader’s mandate.

The valberedning seeks to foster internal consensus around a new leader – almost at any price. But in contemporary Sweden’s disorienting, multidimensional political space, it is getting harder to find a leader whom (nearly) all Social Democrats can live with. A colourless leadership nominee, one whom no faction feels impelled to refuse, is thus increasingly likely to emerge from the process. Yet that sort of leader only cements the party’s impasse. Without an ideological platform or even much of an ideological reputation, the leader cannot subsequently claim a mandate to lead in any distinct direction.

In the latest selection process, talk of epic behind-the-scenes battles came to nothing. Andersson’s seniority in government made her a strong candidate from the start. That she is a woman, that her party is so self-consciously feminist, that it was embarrassed by Sweden’s being the one Nordic country never to have had a female prime minister – all this, combined with her credentials, made her unbeatable. Her rivals melted away. Every one of the Social Democrats’ 26 regional branches nominated her as its preferred candidate. And this means that she was chosen because of who she is and what she has done, not because of her ideas about the future. No one knows what her ideas are.

What might they be? Interestingly, the “woke” tendency that holds such sway over much of the anglophone left these days is less ascendant in Sweden; its influence seems to have peaked several years ago. That still leaves many possible political strategies, though. Occasionally, Andersson has strayed beyond her economic brief and hinted at wanting a tougher approach to crime. Recently, she suggested raising taxes on savings, thus pitching to the left. The two positions might even be compatible, as the Danish Social Democrats have shown in recent years.

Yet who knows how committed Andersson really is to one idea or another? Just as importantly, who knows what her party wants – or at least is prepared to accept? A leader-selection process that featured open competition between candidates might have exposed the fissures among the Social Democrats, but it could also have revealed where the party’s centre of ideological gravity lies. They never got that chance. No one knows where it lies.
Perhaps Andersson will confound such pessimism. She might turn out to have more political acumen than people realize. She might create her own mandate, her own scope to lead, maybe through winning the 2022 election. Or perhaps Swedish Social Democracy will remain paralyzed, incapable of renewing itself, just hanging around until Swedish voters eventually forget what the point of the party ever was.

This article was published as part of a larger elections feature for Inroads 50. To check out the rest, go to Elections Bring Change (Except in Canada).

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