Totally, the funds for the civil defense will increase from 8.5 billion kronor this year to 12.9 billion kronor in 2026, as appears at a press conference with the Tidö parties.
Of these, three billion are new, in addition to the staircase that has already been decided that the civil defense should grow with.
Further reinforcements are planned for 2027 and 2028.
When this government took office, the allocation to the civil defense was 2.7 billion kronor, says Minister for Civil Defense Carl-Oskar Bohlin.
The funds for the civil defense during this period (2022-2028) will be sevenfold. We will thus reach a level of almost 20 billion kronor by 2028.
Healthcare stockpile
Of the new money, the majority, approximately 1.3 billion, is invested in initiatives to increase preparedness in health, care, and social services. This can, for example, involve better inventory management of healthcare products, according to Matheus Enholm from the Sweden Democrats.
The rest is distributed among initiatives in, among other things, municipalities and regions, food and drinking water supply, as well as rescue services and protection of the civilian population. Some of the money goes to crisis stocks for food.
Sweden has been naive, that we dismantled the civil preparedness stockpiling of food around the millennium shift, we are now paying a high price for, says Rural Minister Peter Kullgren (KD).
Parties in agreement
In Sweden, all parliamentary parties have previously agreed to borrow money to upgrade the civil defense. This involves a loan framework of up to 50 billion.
Of the approximately 12 new billion that will now be invested until 2028, 7 billion come from the loan framework, while 5 billion are taken from the budget's reform space, according to Bohlin.
NATO has stated that countries should allocate 5 percent of GDP to defense by 2035 at the latest, of which 3.5 is purely military and 1.5 percent is defense-related initiatives, including civil defense and certain infrastructure. When Sweden reaches the 1.5 percent target is unclear.
It is not fully defined what can be included there, says Bohlin.
