Debate: Don't Hand Trump's Dangerous Power to Kristersson

The allure of emergency laws is easy to understand. However, granting the government such extensive power can be dangerous, writes Adam Danieli from Timbro.

DEBATE. On February 1st this year, President Trump imposed extensive tariffs on almost all countries worldwide. Tariffs should ideally be decided by Congress—the American parliament—but by declaring a state of emergency, Trump managed to bypass the elected officials and act despotically. With a stroke of a pen, the global market was thrown into uncertainty.

This is just one of eight emergencies declared by President Trump during his first months in office. His actions are perhaps the best example of the abuse of emergency powers that have become increasingly common in the Western world.

Instead of presenting proposals in parliaments and engaging in debate, governments claim an emergency exists—and therefore they must act independently.

The Swedish government now wants to take this risk. Recently, they proposed constitutional changes to enable a Swedish state of emergency. Such a possibility has not existed before, which is no coincidence. Historical experiences of power abuse led to the deliberate exclusion of emergency powers when drafting the Swedish constitution. This insight is now being discarded.

With the new proposal, Stefan Löfven and Magdalena Andersson might have declared an emergency in February 2020

Even though the government does its best to pretend otherwise, the change is dramatic. According to the proposal, the government, without parliamentary involvement, could issue decrees affecting almost all areas of society—if it considers there is a severe crisis.

Significant restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, curfews, new crimes, confiscation of property, detentions, or mass deportations could be introduced immediately—without debate or transparency. Instead of proposals being presented in parliament with full transparency, parliament must actively repeal them afterward.

The most concerning aspect is the ambiguity about when these powers should be used. Sweden has one of the world's fastest legislative processes—it can take just a few hours to pass a proposal if there is broad support. The government's proposal does not provide a single concrete example of a situation where these new powers would have been necessary.

Government Decides

In practice, it will be up to the sitting government to decide if it considers there is a crisis. Was the refugee wave in 2015 such a crisis? And is the climate crisis so urgent that democracy cannot keep up? We simply have to trust that future governments do not think their policies are so important that parliament should be bypassed.

The allure of emergency laws is easy to understand—you want to be prepared for the worst. But there is not a single example in Swedish history where the type of powers now proposed would have improved preparedness, quite the opposite.

This became evident during the pandemic when the united opposition demanded adjustments to the so-called pandemic law proposed by the then-government and acted as a counterbalance to unnecessarily far-reaching measures. Without diminishing the suffering the pandemic caused, evaluations have shown that Sweden's more restrained handling was successful. In other countries, where governments took exceptional powers, overreactions occurred.

With the new proposal, Stefan Löfven and Magdalena Andersson might have declared an emergency in February 2020—and we could have lived under a state of emergency for two years. It would have harmed Sweden.

Even in pressured situations, we must remember that politicians are only human. Extensive research on crisis management shows that countries that impose states of emergency generally handle crises worse—precisely because counterbalances are lacking. This insight seems to have been lost by the government.

By Adam Danieli

Rule of Law Officer, Timbro