SWEDISH FAR-RIGHT PARTY EXPLOITS IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY’S FEARS
The Sweden Democrats are courting Assyrians’ votes. Gareth Browne, reporting from Sodertalje, explains how
After three decades’ service on Sweden’s railways, Matta Brahim retired to volunteer on the council of Sodertalje’s St Thomas’s Church and live a quiet life helping his transplanted Iraqi community settle in a peaceful corner of Europe.
The church has become a focal point for the thousands of Assyrians who fled the Middle East in waves over four decades, most recently in 2014 as the Christian towns and villages of northern Iraq and eastern Syria were gutted by ISIS. The community traces its links to Sweden back to the 1970s, when the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca recruited workers for its nearby factory.
When Mr Brahim fled Iraq, Sweden’s liberal asylum policies were usually described as the most generous in Europe.
The community’s identity was not only tolerated but actively encouraged by the state. In government schools, Assyrian children are given two hours of tuition in the Assyrian language every week, while churches and community groups bid for grants and hold major celebrations for the Assyrian new year.
Sodertalje was often held up as an example, the small city of barely 70,000 taking in more Iraqi refugees than the United States in 2003. More than 50 per cent of the population now is from immigrant backgrounds, but the city has not been immune to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment.
National elections on September 9 are expected to show a strong performance from the Sweden Democrats, who are riding the populist wave sweeping Europe. As recently as the 1990s, many saw the party as synonymous with Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement.
Gustaf Ekstrom, the co-founder, volunteered for the SS in the Second World War, while other senior figures played various roles in Scandinavia’s more contemporary Nazi movements.
Current leader Jimmie Akesson has gone mainstream since he took over in 2005, professionalising its workings and fine-tuning its messaging as it became one of the country’s biggest political parties.
“They have become more house trained,” said Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Lund University.
Recent polls consistently put them in second place, with between 18 per cent and 24 per cent of the national vote – a leap from the 12.9 per cent they gained at the last election in 2014.
The numbers suggest the Sweden Democrats will be kingmaker in the next parliament.
The terms of this general election debate have been hauled into the Sweden Democrats’ stamping ground. Radio and TV segments have been dominated by immigration and crime, something that has left the political establishment floundering to catch up.
One of the more unlikely places the populists have touted for support is within the 150,000-strong Assyrian community.
Mr Brahim, leaning on the church’s rostrum, said politicians from the Swedish Democrats have been allowed to campaign in the church foyer after Sunday Mass.
“People are angry that Muslims are coming and getting state permits compared to Christians who lost everything,” he said. “The Sweden Democrats will protect us from the Muslims. They are not against us. Many from my community will vote for them.”
Critics say they are playing on the community’s memories of persecution at the hands of militants in the Middle East.
Afram Yacoub, an Assyrian activist originally from the Syrian city of Qamishli, is fearful they are making a serious mistake. “They buy the rhetoric of the Swedish Democrats, they see it as an anti-Muslim party, not an anti-immigrant party. They don’t want to realise that the Sweden Democrats are against all immigrants.
“They say politically correct stuff nowadays, but the core of the party is still pretty near fascism,” he said.
Whether the country’s problems, which include increasingly visible gang violence – 100 cars were torched in the city of Gothenburg recently – and a stretched healthcare system, entirely boil down to immigration is an argument the Swedish Democrats appear to be winning.
Some say the shift in debate is a result of the populists’ growth, but others say it is a response to realities.
Paula Bieler, an MP and the party’s immigration spokeswoman, focuses on the legacy of the peak influx.
“The problems have escalated – we are still dealing with what happened in the autumn of 2015,” she said, referring to Sweden’s decision to take in 163,000 refugees at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis, more per capita than any other EU country.
Mr Sannerstedt agrees that although “the public debate has changed tremendously, this has not just been down to the Sweden Democrats. There has been a lot of attention on all the practical problems of handling the huge inflow of people in 2015, and the problems associated to the huge inflow of migrants”.
Both factors have forced parties across the spectrum to shift tack, with even Sweden’s immigration-friendly centrist and liberal parties being forced to take more hardline approaches on immigration and asylum.
Senior figures repudiated the sympathetic policies of recent years. On August 23, former prime minister Goran Persson said it was now necessary to lower “Sweden’s generosity to an absolute minimum”.
The far-right has also taken its own steps to change its image. Hundreds of members have been kicked out for everything from racism to openly displaying Nazi sympathies.
Party members say there has been a serious effort to cleanse the Sweden Democrats of their past, yet serious questions linger and scandals continued to emerge even in recent weeks.
The troubled past no longer has the power to dent the far-right party’s momentum, allowing it to capitalise on the collective failures of the established political parties.
Even staunch opponents of the Sweden Democrats believe its rise has been facilitated by a collective failure of the established political parties to debate sensitive issues.
One statistic dominating headlines in the closing week of the election campaign is how 58 per cent of those convicted of rape in Sweden over the past five years were born abroad. What is also notable is that it came to light after an investigation by public broadcaster STV.
“Five years ago, the media in Sweden would never have investigated the rape issue,” said Nuri Kino, an investigative journalist.
“[Sweden Democrats] have become so big because of the failure of the other parties; they have used the fact that so many problems were not publicly debated.”
Despite their growth, a government including Mr Akesson remains an unlikely prospect. Before now the Sweden Democrats have been kept out of national government thanks to a cordon sanitaire adopted by the parliament’s other main parties, which kept it out of power.
Sweden Democrat MP Bieler believes this situation may soon have to change.
“It’s becoming increasingly unsustainable, and if they try to maintain it, it is the voters who will judge them,” she said.