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The Far Right Is Ready For a Slice of Real Power in Sweden

The Far Right Is Ready to Claim a Slice of Real Power in Sweden

The populists who’ve been battling to shut down immigration into Europe may be heading for a significant breakthrough in Sweden.

The far-right Sweden Democrat party may well have the votes to help the conservative opposition secure a majority after next year’s elections, and the evidence is mounting that traditional right-wing politicians will be tempted to cut a deal to give the anti-immigrant group a say in government.

The populist party’s emergence has tracked the Nordic country’s influx of immigrants and difficulties integrating them. A worsening in gang-related violence in recent years has also pushed more voters to the right, and parties across the political spectrum have taken a tougher stand on migrants in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2015.

The Far Right Is Ready For a Slice of Real Power in Sweden
The Far Right Is Ready For a Slice of Real Power in Sweden

“The old arguments for not talking to us no longer exist,” Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson said in an interview, adding the conservatives agree with him “at least on the direction.” “It’s difficult to call us ugly names and at the same time copy our politics.”

While European populists haven’t managed the major breakthrough that some people feared was at hand in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, French nationalist Marine Le Pen is stronger than ever as she prepares to take on President Emmanuel Macron next year and Italy’s Matteo Salvini is still the narrow favorite to follow Mario Draghi. Sweden could prove a bellwether for a broader shift in European politics.

Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the opposition Moderate party, had his first face-to-face meeting with Akesson in 2019, shortly after the nationalist party had surged to the top of the opinion polls.

This January, he said the Sweden Democrats had become a “constructive force” in parliament and that he would cooperate with them.

In late 2017, Kristersson had repeatedly said he wouldn’t engage with the Sweden Democrats. That year, Trump triggered an angry backlash from Swedes when, at a rally in Florida, he appeared to link the rise in crime in the country to higher immigration. That link is now more widely accepted.

While Sweden has slashed immigration by half from its peak in 2016, the Sweden Democrats have signaled they would go much further to stem the flow, and aim to repatriate refugees to war-torn countries such as Syria. They also want to stop paying some benefits to anyone who isn’t a Swedish citizen, or about 9% of the population of 10.4 million.

The Moderates tweeted Tuesday that those who are denied a residency permit in Sweden have to return to their homeland, and that the party wants to deny foreign aid to countries that refuse to take back their own citizens.

Rising Crime

Sweden, at the top of most global welfare rankings, has traditionally sought to be a safe haven by accepting waves of immigrants since World War II. The country, which grew accustomed to relatively low levels of crime, has witnessed a surge of bombings and riots in immigrant neighborhoods in the past decade.

Sweden’s police chief last August lamented an “extremely serious” escalation of violence related to gang crime, urging society to “put its foot down.” He spoke after two people were murdered in Stockholm in a week and several police officers were injured during a riot in the southern city of Malmo. A 12-year-old girl had also been killed “in a criminal showdown” earlier that month.

The country reported about 10 times more deadly shootings than the U.K. in the past year, adjusted for population size.

The Far Right Is Ready For a Slice of Real Power in Sweden

A poll by DN/Ipsos on Monday showed policies on migration and integration remain the biggest priority for Swedish voters. The proportion who also point to law and order as one of the most important issues is greater than ever at 22%.

Akesson’s party, once shunned across the political spectrum, first made it into parliament in 2010 and became the third-biggest in Sweden by 2018. It has made itself more palatable for traditional right-wing politicians in past years by weeding out neo-Nazis and reversing its stand on leaving the European Union.

“When they entered parliament, the entire leadership of SD were part of a neo-nazi party that later changed,” said Jonas Hinnfors, professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg. “Some of that leadership was part of that change of course.”

The Far Right Is Ready For a Slice of Real Power in Sweden

While Kristersson, the Moderate leader, has opened up to the party, he’s said he wouldn’t invite them into a coalition with a smaller conservative peer, the Christian Democrats.

This suggests the Moderates may opt for a minority government, while relying on support from Akesson’s party on specific issues such as migration. That would resemble the fragile constellation negotiated by Social Democrat Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, which took four months of fraught talks after the last elections.

The opposition conservative block, including the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats, had 47.3% support in the latest poll from Demoskop, ahead of the 44.5% tally for the Social Democrats, Greens and their budget allies.

Boarding Party

Either way, Akesson has been preparing by beefing up the ranks of people experienced in governing, calling it his “boarding party.”

“We have recruited expertise during this term, especially from the Moderates,” Akesson said. Still, talks on any formal deal between the potential partners haven’t started yet.

Even though Sweden is decades behind some of its European peers on right-wing politics, the normalization of the radical right started several years ago in Sweden with the adoption of their ideas, according to Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia and an expert on far-right politics. “Collaboration, where radical right parties are also normalized, is often the next logical step.”

Last weekend, Lofven’s budget ally, the Liberal Party, joined nationalists and the conservative opposition to challenge a migration policy deemed too lax. They want to restrict awarding residence permits on humanitarian grounds and tighten conditions for family reunification, among other things.

About 675,000 adult immigrants in Sweden are dependent on benefits, while the country has granted more than 400,000 asylum-related residence permits in the last decade, the Moderates said last month.

While Kristersson denied a conservative bloc is in the making, experts said a shift is under way.

“We have a right-wing bloc again, with a nationalistic social-conservative party weighing heavily within that four-party constellation,” Professor Hinnfors said. “Of course, there are a lot of tensions within that bloc.”

A potential coalition involving the Sweden Democrats could still stumble as “there’s a lot of skepticism among the other parties on the Sweden Democrats’ views on Swedishness, ethnicity, but also perhaps gender issues,” he said.

Akesson suggests his party may still be attractive to xenophobic elements “as long as Stefan Lofven and others continue to call us racists.”

“But the important thing is how we handle it when we discover it,” Akesson said. “And there’s no doubt at all that we have a very low level of tolerance when it comes to extremism and racism.”

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.