The Social Democrats, Centre Party, Green Party and Left Party had hoped to convince two or more MPs from the Liberal Party, or all of the independent MPs, to rebel on the issue – something which happens only very rarely in Sweden – which would have given them the votes needed to pass their joint counter-proposal.
The bill passed unamended with a large majority, meaning that the over 100,000 foreigners who are currently waiting for a decision on their citizenship applications, many of whom applied years ago, will need to meet new residency, language, civics knowledge and self-sufficiency requirements.
"This is a heartbreaking and deeply frustrating moment – but not an unexpected one," said Patrick Gallen, spokesperson for Fair Transition, the energetic grassroots campaign launched by foreigners affected by the bill. "The legislative path may have closed, but the legal path remains open. After June 6th, when the law comes into force, we will identify strong legal challenges and pursue them through the courts."
The campaign had raised awareness in the Swedish media and among MPs about the unfairness of imposing new requirements on applications made years ago.
In the end, the parliament voted 147 against adding the transitional rules, and 146 in favour, meaning the proposal was rejected by one vote. The Swedish citizenship bill was then passed in its original form with a strong majority.
Annika Hirvonen, the Green Party MP responsible for drawing up the opposition’s joint counter-proposal, told The Local before the vote that she hoped that both Sweden Democrat independents would vote for the opposition motion, and in the end both did so, according the list of MP's votes, but that was not enough to win the vote.
Cecilia Rönn, Jakob Olofsgård and Helene Odenjung, the three Liberal MPs seen as possible rebels, were all absent.
After the vote Hirvonen accused the Sweden Democrats of breaking long-established parliamentary protocol on 'pairing off' to win the vote, by sending two MPs to vote who had been put on an agreed list of MPs who would be absent.
"They sent in two people to manipulate the outcome," she told The Local. "This has never happened before... it doesn't look like anything else than than conscious manipulation of the result."
She said that the Sweden Democrat's unprecedented breaking of the pairing agreement, would have to have "consequences".
"We will need to discuss how we are going to proceed, because after this kind of breach of trust, we can't continue as if nothing has happened. A reasonable thing to do, of course, would take an initiative to bring this issue to a new vote again."
Elsa Widding, one of the former Sweden Democrat MPs, who now leads the Ambition Sverige party, told The Local after the vote that in her opinion not including transitional rules both contravened legal principles and risked inundating the court system with appeals.
"It's not the case, as the Sweden Democrats' believe extremely naively, that now there will be 100,000 people who won't become citizens or who will need to learn Swedish, but instead it will be the case that Sweden will shame itself as a country which purports to uphold the rule of law," she told The Local.
She said she suspected that the government parties had won the vote on the reservation because the government sent an MP to vote who they had agreed with the opposition to hold back to balance out an absent opposition MP.
"They still sent in a guy who had been ‘paired out’, so they kind of cheated the system to get this through, otherwise the opposition would have won, and there would have been transitional rules," she claimed. "Instead, it’s going to be complete chaos.”
The new citizenship law, which will come into force on June 6th, will increase the residency requirement for citizenship from five to eight years in most cases, impose new language and civics knowledge requirements, and bring in a new self-sufficiency requirement, set at 20,850 kronor in the first year.
READ ALSO: What’s in Sweden’s sweeping citizenship reforms?
The rejection of the transitional rules means that more than 100,000 people who have already applied for citizenship before June 6th, or who have been rejected and have appealed, will now have to meet the new requirements if a decision is made after the rules come into force, even if their applications were submitted years ago.
Both the government inquiry, which drew up the new stricter citizenship requirements, and the Council on Legislation, which is responsible for vetting new laws in Sweden, had recommended that the law include transitional provisions.
But the government overruled both, arguing that adding transitional rules would give the security services less time to investigate those waiting for a citizenship decision and ensure that they do not represent a risk to Sweden’s security.
Migration Minister Johan Forssell told The Local in March that the government did not want transitional rules, “because we want these changes to take place as soon as possible for security reasons”.
Comments (29)