Next Sunday, Swedes will vote in their country’s general election, with polls indicating that it will become the next European state to embrace a worrying, far-right political shift on the continent.
According to current polling, the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) are poised to gain around 20 percent of all votes, making them the country’s second or third biggest party and representing a massive increase from 2010, when they first entered parliament with just 5.7 percent of votes.
Sweden’s parliamentary system means that none of the current political parties, including the Socialist Social Democratic Party or the conservative Moderate Party, will have the strength to govern alone. Instead, they’ll need to form an alliance with other political parties. With SD potentially receiving a fifth of the vote or more, this could position them as kingmakers within the Swedish Parliament.
Like Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Berlin and The Northern League in Italy, SD has focused on Swedish resentment over immigration and crime — including a reported surge in rape cases and incidents like a coordinated arson attack in Goteborg earlier in August. The extent to which immigration and crime are linked is tenuous, but the arrival of over 600,000 immigrants into Sweden has presented the far-right with a perfect opportunity to present such a narrative.
Under their leader Jimmie Akesson, SD has tried to tone down the party’s hardline stance. As the Guardian noted, for example, Akesson’s policy of cultural nationalism stresses that immigrants who learn Swedish and accept its culture are welcome. He has also stressed a “zero tolerance” policy towards any SD member making racist or antisemitic statements.
But worryingly, the same factors that have been present in right-wing electoral victories from Donald Trump in the United States to AfD in Germany have also been seen in Sweden. For instance, the Swedish Defense Research Agency warned on Wednesday that the number of Twitter bots professing support for the SD were increasing exponentially.
The Swedish election has also been an increasingly popular topic on 4chan’s /pol/ board, one of the main online havens for the far-right. As researchers at the British anti-racism group Hope Not Hate have previously documented, many on the far-right have an obsession with Sweden because of its supposedly “pure” white heritage.
What’s more, antisemitism and racism are evident in SD, despite what Akesson may say. On Thursday two local SD politicians were asked to leave the party after purchasing Nazi items online. One of them, Per Olsson, had a Facebook page with a photo of Anne Frank which described her as “the coolest Jew in the shower room.” On Tuesday, the Swedish newspaper Expressen and anti-racism group Expo named six individuals “deeply rooted in the Nazi environment” who are on the ballot as SD politicians. There’s also the fact that the SD, which first formed in 1988, has its roots in vehemently hardline anti-immigration rhetoric.
Amid all of this, the more immediately violent ultra nationalist far-right is also gaining in strength. Last week, the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement held a march through central Stockholm. On August 13th, two members of the Nordic Resistance Movement were arrested on suspicion of planning to murder two journalists, with authorities finding a homemade shotgun, ammunition and silencers at the suspect’s home.
It remains to be seen how well SD will actually do come election day, and whether or not they can actually back up their hardline right-wing rhetoric with parliamentary legislation. But their ascendancy is a major shock for Sweden, a country which has prided itself on its open immigration policies, and serves as a reminder that the far-right in Europe remain on the ascendancy.