Before the election to the Swedish parliament of 2022, the then governing party of the Social democrats presented a view of an opponent party, the Sweden democrats, as a security risk. Given the closeness to the election, the press brief gained a lot of attention and created adiscussion about the content. From an academic point of view, the press brief was a new type of phenomenon in Swedish politics, a political party being called a security risk because of accusations of links to Russia and President Putin by the then ruling political party. This paper aims at studying the discourse of the press brief and examine how the Securitization Theory can be used for understanding the press brief, and to what level the theory brings anunderstanding to the phenomenon.
The result of the study shows that the Securitization Theory can be used to gain a deeper understanding in the sense of categorization. Given the theory´s ability to categorize implicit strategies, processes can be found that otherwise had been missed, such as a securitization attempt, a securitization process, or a politicization of the subject. This study contributes with a case showing how the theory of securitization can be used to gain a deeper understanding of political parties in contact with security issues. The study further explains what this contribution consists of in terms of what the securitization theory today can tell us, and how the securitization theory can be used to develop a new theory, or a refinement of itself, to understanding security within a political context.