The hard-right Sweden Democrats (SD) had high hopes of achieving complete “detoxification” in last week’s general elections, said Nicola Quondamatteo in Jacobin (New York).
With its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, the anti-immigrant populist party had started its journey to the mainstream in the 1990s, when it expelled overt hardliners from its ranks and moderated some of its policies. By 2018, it was the third-largest party in the Swedish parliament. But other parties continued to treat the SD as pariahs until 2022, when the party became the second largest, with 73 seats – and a conservative bloc struck the Tidö deal, giving the SD influence over some policy areas in return for it propping up the centre-right minority administration.
Ahead of last week’s election, PM Ulf Kristersson had promised that if the bloc retained power, he’d offer the SD an even bigger prize: places in the cabinet. But Swedish voters had other ideas: they turned away from the SD in droves. With its support down three points, to 17.5%, it lost 11 seats, leaving the right-of- centre bloc with 173 seats in total, three fewer than a centre-left bloc led by Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson.
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Incendiary rhetoric
In a sense, the SD has been a victim of its own success, said Håkan Boström in Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg). When it started railing against immigration, the main parties still took pride in Sweden’s reputation as a haven for refugees. But ten years ago, as Sweden and other EU states reeled from the 2015 refugee crisis, parties across the spectrum agreed that the rules had to be tightened. Then, in 2022, the new SD-supported government embarked on reforms to reduce immigration as much as possible without breaching EU law.
In recent years, asylum claims have fallen sharply and, since 2016, net immigration has fallen by two-thirds to about 47,000 a year. As a result, immigration was not the biggest issue for voters this year. Yet the SD chose “Make Sweden Sweden Again” as its campaign slogan, and stepped up its incendiary rhetoric. “Do you miss Mogadishu? Remigration will help you go home” read an ad it splashed on buses around Gothenburg, which has a large Somali diaspora. This repelled moderate swing voters, and mobilised turnout for the centre-left.
Shifting the dial
In an “ominous political landscape”, European progressives will have derived welcome optimism from the result in Sweden, said The Guardian. But the ray of hope it offers is not a bright one. In Sweden, as elsewhere, the far-right’s nativist agenda has been so normalised that the Social Democrats – should they form an administration – are not proposing a very different approach. And the Sweden Democrats will keep stoking divisions from the sidelines. They and their supporters are already blaming their defeat on “imported” Muslim votes. Europe’s social democrats must be courageous in seeking to “shift the dial of political debate” – or the far-right “will continue to set its terms”.
