News Summary

• Kvittning usually refers to the Swedish parliament's long-standing agreement on how to handle votes when its members have to be absent.
• If an MP from one side is absent, the other side agrees to withhold one of its MPs, too, to preserve the usual political balance of parliament.
• The far-right Sweden Democrats at the last second sent in two of their withheld MPs to vote, after realising that they were about to lose a crucial vote on transitional rules for citizenship.
• The incident led to the breakdown of the agreement, with all 349 MPs as a result having to be present for every single vote in parliament.