“A right-wing bloc that includes a nationalist anti-immigration party [the Sweden Democrats] won a narrow majority in Sweden’s parliament [last] Wednesday. It was a major political shift in the Scandinavian country that had a decades-long history of welcoming refugees, but is grappling with a crime wave linked with immigration.” AP News
The right argues that the success of the Sweden Democrats is due to mainstream parties’ failure to address voters’ concerns about immigration and crime.
“Not long ago, Sweden was so notoriously safe that it might even have been a bit dull. Today, it is exceptional in all the wrong ways. Between 2013 and 2017, Sweden had Europe’s highest number of reported rapes per capita. In 2021, according to Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention, Sweden had the second-highest number of deadly shootings per capita among 22 European nations (after Croatia) for the preceding four years. Ten years ago, Gothenburg University’s annual survey… found that law and order was Swedes’ lowest priority. This year, it is their top priority at 41%…
“Support for the Sweden Democrats has risen for nine consecutive elections. Mr. Åkesson is still described as ‘far right,’ but he campaigned on the centrist consensus: The exceptional aspects of Swedish life won’t survive without tighter immigration, stronger policing and sentencing, and assertive policies on culture and integration. Even the centrist parties now grudgingly agree.”
Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
“[The Sweden Democrats’] roots are indeed more problematic than those of many anti-establishment parties in Europe given that they sprang from a genuinely extremist movement. But their agenda now cannot be described as right-wing extremism. And they had one great advantage: for many years they were the only party to criticize Sweden’s immigration policy. It’s not racist, they insisted, to discuss what’s going wrong, and this is a view that was increasingly widely shared…
“For decades, governments to the left and right pursued a uniquely liberal open-door immigration policy, even though it lacked public support. The foreign-born population has doubled to 20 percent over the past two decades. We took in more people per capita during the 2015 immigration wave than any other country in Europe. How on earth did anyone imagine that a country our size could integrate so many people from such different societies?…
“The Social Democrats spent much of the campaign asking Swedes to imagine the horror of a right-wing government backed by the SD, but much of the electorate didn’t find this horrific… So Sweden, which had the highest levels of immigration in Europe, now has perhaps the most successful anti-immigration, anti-establishment party on the continent. This should be a lesson to European progressives and conservatives alike.”
Paulina Neuding, Spectator World
“Exit polls show that the Sweden Democrats received almost as many working-class votes as the Social Democrats, the traditional Swedish working-class party. Just as in Britain and the United States, economic stagnation and cultural issues are causing the working class to move to the populist right. This fact cannot be ignored by any party that wants to govern Sweden — and by extension many other Western countries… Sweden’s election is just the latest of a decade-long series of wake-up calls for Western elites.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
The left worries that the success of the Sweden Democrats is likely to be replicated elsewhere, and calls for a new economic agenda on the left.
The left worries that the success of the Sweden Democrats is likely to be replicated elsewhere, and calls for a new economic agenda on the left.
“The Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a fierce anti-immigrant, law and order stance, won second place in last week’s national election, backed by one in five voters. Its support will be crucial for the new centre-right coalition aiming to replace the Social Democrats. If the fact that such a party, skewered by opponents as neo-fascist brown shirts, will play kingmaker is not alarming enough, then consider this: in the land of Greta Thunberg’s birth, 22% of first-time voters aged 18 to 21 voted for the Sweden Democrats, a party that shares the European far right’s scepticism about the climate crisis…
“Worries about cost of living and energy crises, the war in Ukraine, immigration and gun crime – a hot-button issue in Sweden – may help explain this phenomenon. And they are not confined to Swedes. Such issues easily translate to Italy, where like-minded far-right parties are poised to win power next weekend… The success of the Sweden Democrats shows that no country is immune to hard-right populist parties.”
Editorial Board, The Observer
“[Ring-wing parties] have few new solutions for today’s destructive economic and environmental crises. They can, however, channel social unrest to their advantage by reheating identities of race, religion and ethnicity, and retailing myths of national greatness…
“President Joe Biden [recently] warned Americans against authoritarian-minded Republicans. Strangely, a great many liberals as well as conservatives criticized Biden for being ‘divisive.’…
“[But] Let there be no doubt: Ongoing transformations in the economy and the environment will make the right more dogmatic, sterile and authoritarian, rather than more flexible, innovative and democratic. To deny this, or to chastise Biden for speaking the plain truth, is to become complicit in a ruinous political trend.”
Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg
“For the first time ever in Sweden, voters have rated crime a ‘most important issue’ in polls… On the one hand, lethal violence in Sweden has been constant for several decades and is now actually slightly lower than in the ’80s and ’90s. However, the last few years have also seen a large increase in gun violence and deaths between warring gangs in the major cities…
“Even though these are mainly internal disputes of a few hundred people, the resulting shoot-outs have taken place in public spaces and [have] spread a general mood of fear and impending chaos, fed by tabloids and right-wing pundits and more often than not seen as a consequence of ‘unrestrained’ immigration…
“The Left needs to present [a] clear and concise break with neoliberal austerity ideology in economic policies, and to neutralize the conflict on crime and migration that is now dividing the blue-collar workers and middle-class progressives who make up a potential base of left support.”
Petter Nilsson and Rikard Warlenius, Jacobin Magazine