This master thesis is concerned with nostalgia and the uses of nostalgia in Swedish politics. Nostalgia as a political tool has been used to great effect through out the western world in the last decades, with the most notable examples being for instance Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the USA or the success of Brexit in the United Kingdom. The rising frequency of nostalgia in politics has led some scholars to suggest that we are living in the age of nostalgia. Despite this, and the fact that scholars from multiple disciplins agree that nostalgia is a tool not just used by populist parties, there are few studies regarding the use of nostalgia as a political tool in Sweden that does not solely focus on the use of nostalgia by said populist parties. This thesis therefore seeks to fill a knowledge gap and study the use of nostalgia by different parts of the Swedish political sphere. The source material examined in the study is the political commercials made by the eight different parties in the Swedish Parliament in the time period of 2010-2022. The research questions of the thesis concerns to which extent nostalgia is used in Swedish politics, how nostalgia appears in the political advertisement, which political messages it is loaded with and which role the use of nostalgia play in the political parties visions of the future.

The thesis is divided into two parts, with the first part studying to which extent nostalgia is present in the source material. By using a qualitative content analys to gather the nostalgic allusions in the commercials, and by also dividing the allusions into aestethic and explicit nostalgia to show that nostalgia can also be present in the visual aspects of the commercials, the result of the study show that nostalgic allusions are present in commercials from all parties during the time period, although some parties use it more than others. The second part of the analysis focuses on the uses of nostalgia by three parties with different ideologies in the Swedish parliament, The Social Democrats, The Left Party and The Sweden Democrats. The analysis is done by analysing the uses of nostalgia in the three parties political commercials as uses of history. The results indicate that all three parties uses vague nostalgic uses of history as a way of looking back at a past that is a perfect snapshot of a golden age of society, in contrast to the chaotic present. The past thus becomes something we need to return to in order to change society for the better. It also shows that the three parties all seem to be nostalgic for the same vague time period in which the Swedish peoples home was strong, even though they have different views on what the peoples home actually constitutes.