2011 Migration Agreement (Alliance + MP)
In 2011 the Reinfeldt Alliance and the Greens signed a cross-bloc framework on asylum and labour migration that safeguarded Sweden's liberal regime through 2015 — explicitly designed to bypass the newly elected Sweden Democrats' parliamentary leverage on the file.
The 2011 Migrationsöverenskommelsen was the 2010 election arithmetic turned into policy. Without a Riksdag majority and with the Sweden Democrats now holding the asylum file as their first-priority leverage point, Reinfeldt II negotiated a cross-bloc framework with Miljöpartiet instead. The deal covered family reunification, labour migration, and reception of asylum seekers — and was deliberately drafted to keep SD outside the negotiation.
That choice mattered structurally. The 2011 framework is the first written instrument of the post-2010 cordon sanitaire — a centre-right governing coalition reaching across to the Greens specifically to insulate one policy area from one party. It locked in a comparatively liberal asylum regime that Sweden carried, almost unrevised, into the autumn of 2015 — when the European refugee crisis forced the 2015:1073 ID-control law and the broader policy U-turn.
The agreement is also a counterfactual marker. Without it, Sweden’s pre-2015 framework would likely have been adjusted earlier and less symbolically; with it, the autumn 2015 reversal had to break a publicly defended deal rather than quietly tighten administrative practice.