The UK election is probably none of my business. I don’t live here and I can’t vote. And yet I’m so invested in the outcome, I have decided to come over from Sweden to volunteer for the Labour party, handing out flyers and knocking on doors. Having grown up in Sweden, I already know some of Jeremy Corbyn’s proposed policies can work. I’ve benefited from free school lunches, have had access to university without tuition fees, and received free dental checkups into my 20s.

Despite having access to all these things back home, I chose to come to the UK in 2014 to do my degree at Oxford University. The combination of subjects in my degree, the tutors who made me think so hard I sometimes thought my head would fall off, and the beautiful city made it worth moving. However, the cultural difference was shocking as I got a glimpse of the class divide in Britain and what life outside the Scandinavian welfare model looks like.

Where Sweden’s Social Democrats have lost the plot, the UK now has an opportunity to change course on similar sentiments

People were sleeping rough all over the city. My fellow students often needed counselling to help cope with the financial stress caused by debt, tuition fees and high living costs. Mental health problems and anxiety were more the rule than the exception.

And while the UK has some of the world’s best universities, high fees have helped turn education into a mere instrument, a rubber stamp on a CV, the point of which is simply to land a job. An Oxford graduate who sued the university in 2016 when he failed to achieve a lucrative legal career was just expressing what is implicit in the functioning of the current education system: the point of a degree is not knowledge in itself.

In an economic system with workaholism built into it, where humans serve eternal capitalist growth, there is no capacity to measure the results of an education apart from monetary gain. Studying to learn, rather than to be of use to someone else, makes you feel like a person worth investing in, not a tool made to serve an economic target. But while Sweden has been known for its welfare state for over a century, the Swedish Social Democrats are not what they used to be. The party’s popularity is declining, and it has started echoing its rightwing opponents on migration, pitting citizens against each other, blaming increased immigration for welfare cuts, and ignoring the needs of the majority it should be representing. It is now in danger of losing its position as Sweden’s largest party.

The Sweden Democrats – a party founded by white supremacists – is polling as the new voter favourite. This comes as no surprise, as it has been setting the political agenda. What started as public worries, after the refugee crisis in 2015, has gone on to become a political obsession with migration and cultural differences.

And it’s not getting any better. After the general election a year ago, the Social Democrats, the Green party and two centre-right liberal parties joined together and made a deal to keep the Sweden Democrats away from any direct political influence. Since then, the Social Democrats have been in government, but they are delivering a manifesto written by neoliberals. In practice, this means that a party once dedicated to building the strongest welfare state in the world is now enforcing policies that harm workers’ interests, and may permanently damage the welfare system it once helped to build.

While social democracy in Scandinavia is slowly being eroded, for me the Labour party has started to represent something beyond just change in the UK, and feels like it could be a force for transformation on the left across Europe. Access to the internet being a democratic right rather than an economic privilege, cheaper train tickets via the renationalisation of railways, pledging to halve food bank usage within just a year: Labour’s ideas are new but at the same time completely intuitive. The party is making it clear that the things that make our lives miserable today are not caused by the laws of nature, but are political priorities that can be changed.

Where Sweden’s Social Democrats have lost the plot, the UK now has an opportunity to undo years of austerity and stop the constant scapegoating of migrants. Corbyn may not be everyone’s cup of tea. He has taken the Labour party in a new direction. He has remained frustratingly neutral on a Brexit referendum. He still needs to deal with antisemitism within the party. Still, I think the number of radical new ideas that the party has presented for this election shows that Labour has the potential to lead the way for social democracy in Europe.

Under Corbyn, Labour has moved from simply being “not conservative” to setting the agenda for political discussion in this election. When Boris Johnson isn’t repeating the same Brexit talking points, he is forced to respond to the opposition’s proposals for change.

I want to see a new social democracy emerge in Europe. Until then, you’ll find me door-knocking in key swing-voter areas around London. Young people have had little or no say in shaping the world as it is today, and now we want a chance to build something new and radical, not just fix the current, malfunctioning system.

• Susanna Kierkegaard is a Swedish journalist specialising in European politics