The Swedish Social Democrat opposition is proposing to make full-time preschool education mandatory for all children, starting at age 3. The idea, part of the preliminary steps of the party’s 2030 action plan, would also outlaw private preschools.
The proposal is an effort to mitigate the effects of the mass migration that the party not only allowed but encouraged during their time in government from 2014 to fall of 2022. The thinking is that getting young children out of the home and into a Swedish-speaking (and Swedish-culture) environment would improve their ability to integrate, minimizing the risk of alienation and the appeal of criminal gangs and radical Islam.
Lack of language skills is a real problem. In the parallel societies where many immigrants live, knowledge of Swedish is not necessary—but that also leaves them isolated from what is still a majority Swedish society.
In these “vulnerable areas”—a euphemism for immigrant-heavy communities—the children would get 30 hours of preschool without cost, and in the rest of the country, 15 hours. Whether or not the children have parents at home, they would be obligated to attend preschool—an effort at integration of immigrant children whose mothers are often homemakers.
“Children who have not attended preschool or who have attended preschools with inadequate linguistic quality perform worse in primary school. The fact that so many children do not have age-appropriate language skills at the start of primary school is something we must address. The situation is urgent,” Lawen Redar, cultural policy spokesman for the Social Democrats and one of the originators of the plan, told daily paper Expressen.
A report from the party says about 4% of children in Sweden do not attend preschool; 53% of them have a migrant background.
The Social Democrats’ suggested solution, however, is not likely to go down well with the Muslim minority community. A pervasive rumor in immigrant communities in the country has claimed that Swedish social services regularly kidnap Muslim children to convert them to Christianity. The rumor campaign started on Arab-language social media in 2021 and resulted in threats to social workers, while bringing together and radicalizing previously unconnected Muslim networks. It was also quoted by Islamist terrorist Abdesalem Lassoued as one of his motives for targeting Swedish football fans in an October 2023 attack that killed two Swedes.
Muslims, however, are not the only ones highly skeptical of the supposedly well-meaning efforts to integrate children into Swedish language and culture from an early age.
Journalist and political columnist Rebecca Weidmo Uvell posed the question on X,
Why should Swedish children with Swedish parents be forced to hand their children over to be raised by the state because foreign children need to learn Swedish? Completely sick proposal. The mandate should specifically target foreign children. THEY need it for the language.
Sweden Democrat MP Mattias Karlsson said,
This is beginning to resemble genuine socialist forced collectivization of our children.
Hanif Bali, former MP for Ulf Kristersson’s Moderate Party and himself an Iranian immigrant who arrived in Sweden unaccompanied aged three, said “They [the Social Democrats] want to remove parental power, the biggest obstacle to their plan.”
In a situation where almost 33% of Swedish high school students in mock EU elections preferred Charlie Weimers’ nationalist Sweden Democrats to the 15.9% that voted for the social democrats, there would be ideological reasons for wanting to make sure the next generation of voters are raised right—or, rather, left.
