The Sweden Democrats have announced they will campaign in the 2026 general election on a pledge to stop migration to the country.
In an op-ed for Svenska Dagbladet published on Wednesday, party leader Jimmie Åkesson and migration policy spokesperson Ludvig Aspling said Sweden’s national security must take precedence over the right to asylum, marking a hardening of the party’s already tough stance on immigration.
“Sweden’s safety must come first — even when it conflicts with the right of asylum,” Åkesson wrote in a Facebook post linking to the article. “Before the 2026 election, we will therefore demand that Sweden be given the opportunity to completely stop migration.”
The article itself proceeds to criticize the foundation of the European Union’s asylum system, calling it flawed because it deprives individual member states of the right to determine how many asylum seekers they admit.
The nationalist duo suggests that the current rights-based asylum regime, which sets no theoretical upper limit on the number of people who can be granted protection so long as they meet the legal criteria, is not fit for purpose.
According to the party, this legal framework has created a “strange situation,” where countries like Greece, Poland, and Finland have effectively sealed their borders to asylum seekers, yet received approval from Brussels. Åkesson noted that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen even praised Greece for previously closing its border with Turkey, calling it “Europe’s shield.”
“We see it as completely obvious that migration from certain countries is a direct threat to national security here in our country as well,” Åkesson and Aspling stated. “It is time for Sweden to start adapting its actions to reality and stop treating EU rules as if they were Swedish law.”
While Åkesson initially vowed to give Swedish voters the chance to “completely stop migration,” the article suggests a Sweden Democrats administration would initially clamp down on asylum policy and pause migration from specific regions, reserving the right to halt migration in its entirety should the deteriorating security situation in Sweden not improve.
The duo cited an increase in bombings, shootings, religious extremism, and criminal networks as justification for exceptional measures, arguing that these conditions meet the threshold of an extraordinary situation, comparable to those that once allowed the Swedish government to temporarily override ordinary immigration laws. That provision was abolished in 1976, but the Sweden Democrats now want it reinstated.
“If public security does not improve significantly before [the election], we will then demand that the ordinary immigration law be put out of play during the term of office,” the party stated. This would involve pausing migration from Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, with limited exceptions, and expelling the roughly 6,000 foreign nationals identified by Swedish police as having links to gang crime.
The party also hinted that “other unconventional measures may also be relevant” depending on the security situation.
The Sweden Democrats have helped to prop up the current center-right administration in the country, lending it the votes it needs to govern effectively in exchange for pledges to tighten asylum and immigration rules and bolster law and order.
But, according to Åkesson and Aspling, steering immigration policy toward the EU’s minimum legal standards is no longer sufficient, and Stockholm must go further to preserve the Swedish way of life.
“It is time for Sweden to also become part of Europe’s shield,” they concluded.
Åkesson has previously called for a ban on new citizenship applications into Sweden under the current government, criticizing what he claims is the “completely crazy policy” of allowing applications by “individuals from deeply dysfunctional countries where there are often completely different values than those that characterize our Swedish culture.”
At his party’s annual conference in November 2023, the Swedish nationalist made headlines after he advocated in favor of Swedish authorities being handed the power to requisition and demolish mosques that are proven to be used to promote messages incompatible with Western values.
“It is not a right to come to our country and build monuments to a foreign and imperialist ideology,” Åkesson told his party’s faithful, also demanding a ban on the construction of new mosques.
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