Murarna som inte skulle byggas

Sammanfattning: In a speech at the demonstration for refugees at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm on September 6, 2015, the Social Democrats’ party leader and Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven made it clear that his Europe does not build walls when the need is great. However, the autumn that followed the number of refugees seeking asylum in Sweden reached record highs. Shortly after Löfven’s speech, the governing Social Democrats and the Green Party proposed measures that resulted in a tightening of the Swedish refugee policy. Based on a case study design and through a rationalist analysis of motives, this thesis uses Gunnar Sjöblom’s theory of party strategies and Jonas Hinnfors’ application of and addition to the same theory to explain the Social Democrats’ drastic reversal of their migration policy. The result makes probable that the Social Democratic party board had strategic motives with the new tighter refugee policy but also that the social conditions changed during the autumn of 2015 and gave rise to a conflict. The party’s original position in their refugee policy was challenged by a new reality where it can be argued that the realization of other political commitments were complicated by the maintenance of this position.