The COVID-19 Crisis in Sweden: Political Constitutionalism Is Back!
21 Pages Posted: 4 Jan 2023
Date Written: December 26, 2022
Abstract
As in every country around the world, the COVID-19 crisis had a rather strong impact on the constitutional discourse of Sweden. However, as this works attempts to show, the effect of the crisis, in contrast to other Western legal realities, was in the direction of turning back the clock, or at least halting the development achieved in recent decades. Since the 1990s Sweden has seen its constitutional discourse shift from the idea of political constitutionalism as its main attribute, moving closer to the features that typify legal constitutionalism. However, the social, political, and economic emergencies ignited by the COVID-19 pandemic brought back to the surface the deeper and traditional Swedish feature of political constitutionalism as the backbone of the constitutional discourse: a culture where the legal actors tend to be somewhat marginalized, relegated mainly to playing operational roles in relation to the decisions taken by the political actors.
Keywords: Constitutionalism, COVID-19, Sweden, Political Actors, Legal Actors
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