The Green Party is submitting an "emergency motion" to the speaker of parliament, demanding that the vote on transitional rules for citizenship be retaken.
The Green Party previously submitted an initiative to retake the vote in the parliament's Social Insurance Committee, where it was voted down by the government majority.
"Our first try to get this to a new vote was through the committee initiative but that was voted down," Hirvonen told The Local, "[so] we decided to use this mechanism."
"It's very rare," Hirvonen explained about the use of the emergency motion. "We've done it before a couple of times during my more than ten years as a member of parliament, and one was when Sweden joined Nato, and the other time was due to the teen deportations recently."
The far-right Sweden Democrats defeated the opposition on transitional rules for citizenship on April 29th by sending two MPs to vote whom they had promised to withhold, leading to opposition accusations of cheating, as The Local was first to report.
The MPs should have been held back under the system of kvittning, or "pairing", under which parties agree to hold back MPs from voting to balance out MPs from the opposing side who are sick or who have other engagements.
The Sweden Democrats have claimed that they only acted in this way so that the vote would reflect the result of the 2022 election and the will of the voters.
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In the Swedish parliament, an "emergency motion" may be brought in response to an event of great importance, at least ten members of parliament must support it, and it must be an event that could not have been foreseen or taken into account during the general motion period.
Hirvonen believes that Sweden Democrats' actions in the vote on April 29th are such a situation.
"The Sweden Democrats have de facto manipulated the result of a parliamentary vote by violating the set-off agreement. This directly affects the rights of over 100,000 people," she told the TT news agency.
More than 100,000 people are currently waiting for a decision on citizenship. When the requirements for becoming a Swedish citizen are tightened on June 6th, those in the queue will also be included, even though they applied under the old rules.
This is something the opposition has been critical of, but which, according to the government coalition, is important for Sweden's security.
It will now be up to speaker Andreas Norlén to decide whether the criteria for submitting an emergency motion are met. If so, the motion will be sent to committee for preparation and a new report will be written.
"There's no precedent that would ensure that this motion is allowed," Hirvonen told The Local, "because of course nothing like this has ever happened before, and [the Speaker's] party members could possibly be able to influence such a decision. But of course I trust in the integrity of the Speaker as the Speaker, first and foremost."
If the criteria are not considered to be met, the Green Party still has the opportunity to propose in the chamber that the motion be sent to the Constitution Committee, which will then decide whether it can be submitted to parliament.
"In the last vote [on transitional rules, on April 29th], nearly half of the Liberal [Party] group were absent," Hirvonen told The Local, "which leads me to think that there were people that, due to their conscience, did not want to vote in favour of the government proposal."
"Of course, I don't know that, and I cannot know either whether or not some people have changed their minds," she said, and pointed to media reports that one of the former Sweden Democrat MPs who voted in favour of transitional rules on April 29th has since been subject to death threats and has said she doesn't feel safe voting against her former party.
"So I don't know," said Hirvonen. "But I do hope that everyone who actually thinks it's right to have transition rules will vote for them."
With reporting from TT
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