Why IS the most liberal country in Europe lurching to the Far Right?
With Sweden poised for a massive swing to a party with neo-Nazi roots tomorrow
YOU would never find a scene like this during a British general election. outside a railway station in the Stockholm suburbs, all the main parties have little cabins neatly lined up like exhibitors at a trade show.
Each offers coffee, literature and a chair for those who might want a longer chat. Superficially, it is all very polite, very democratic — very Swedish, in fact.
Today, though, all the attention is focused on one stand. And there is a tense atmosphere. A young crowd, mainly students, have surrounded the stall of the nationalist Sweden Democrats.
‘will you deport all people like me — who don’t look white?’ asks Joel Svensson, 26, pointing his finger at a middle-aged man.
Half-Colombian, half- Gambian, Joel has lived in Sweden for 15 years, works at Foot Locker, speaks Swedish, pays his (hefty) taxes and is increasingly agitated. ‘will you deport all Muslims?’ he shouts. ‘only those who don’t have citizenship and don’t obey the law,’ says the party worker. Two policemen turn up in case things ngs escalate but they do not. Eventually, Joel and his group walk off but he is still angry. Sweden, he tells me, has become much more racist in recent years.
‘Things are changing here and they want to blame someone. People just don’t understand that they need immigrants like me,’ he says. HOWEVER, there is a similar sense of frustration back at the Sweden Democrats’ hut. ‘People tear up our leaflets and tell us to **** off,’ says retired accountant Dan Strom, 69, a member of the party for three years. ‘I get used to it. But what really upsets people these days is all the crime.’
Crime and immigration are dominating an election which has become so un-Swedish that many people talk openly about a national identity crisis.
Gangland shootings are so commonplace they barely make the news. A new fad for synchronised car-burnings has been making the headlines instead.
All of it is blamed — however unfairly — on immigrants in a country where 20 per cent of the population were born elsewhere. Now comes fresh data (unearthed last month by state Tv) that rape is on the increase, that nearly 60 per cent of all convicted rapists since 2015 have been foreign- born and that 40 per cent had been in Sweden for less than a year.
It helps explain why the Sweden Democrats have gone so swiftly from the fringes to the political mainstream. Just three years ago, they were social outcasts. Now, they could be the largest single party when Sweden goes to the polls on Sunday while the centre-left Social Democrats, who lead the current coalition government, are on track for their worst result since before ABBA were born. Though the Sweden Democrats’ roots are in neo-Nazi yobbery during the Eighties, they have succeeded in reinventing themselves as an authentic family-friendly voice of Nordic conservatism. The old fascistic torch logo has been replaced with a cute hippy-style flower, giving their campaign a surreal soap powder feel.
At the last election, they doubled their vote and won 49 of the 349 seats in parliament. In tomorrow’s election, they are expected to win 20 to 25 per cent and could well hold the balance of power in a fractious parliament where no one party will have control.
Dull, worthy, Swedish politics have suddenly got both alarming and interesting.
For they are following the same pattern which we have seen across Europe recently as antiimmigration parties wreak political havoc in Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland and elsewhere.
Now it is happening in ultraliberal l Sweden, too, which has accepted a more migrants per head of population than any EU nation — 250,000 since 2015.
LAST year’s terrorist attack in Stockholm, when a failed asylum- seeker drove a truck through a crowded pedestrian precinct, killing four, still resonates .
For many Swedes, though, this is just part of a wider issue.
As with Trump supporters in America, there are large numbers who feel rejected by a complacent political establishment no longer on their wavelength.
In the Stockholm suburb of Solna, I meet Julia Kronild, the Sweden Democrat MP who would be foreign secretary if they ever formed a government.
Her Cv is not what one might expect. A social worker before entering parliament in 2010, her political journey began while she spent a year and half working for a charity in Papua New Guinea. ‘I was an assistant nurse and teacher there. For me, it was important to learn their language and their ways,’ she says.
‘I came back to Sweden and I could see things were changing. we had immigrants coming here and everyone said that we had to change our ways.’
As a former aid worker, Julia says that she is all in favour of foreign aid but that asylum must be sought in the nearest safe nation. ‘I have been to refugee camps and we need to spend more money in those areas, not here,’ she says.
‘we need to take away the pull factors that bring people here. why is it cheaper for asylumseekers to get dental care than for the elderly?’
Many dispute these statistics, along with so many other incendiary claims by the Sweden Democrats, but it is a narrative that has taken root.
For decades, Swedish elections were all the same. The Social Democrats would win by a mile and carry on building the Swedish dream: thumping taxes in exchange for cradle-to-grave welfare and just enough money for a modest holiday shack on the coast.
It’s the sort of utopian vision
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had in mind this week when he talked of pushing up taxes to make Britain less ‘unjust’. The difference is that Sweden grew up accepting the idea that if you give most of your money to the state, the state will spend it wisely. In Britain, we beg to differ. And now the Swedes are having their doubts, too.
‘People used to have a very clear idea of what it meant to be Swedish,’ says Johan Hakelius, editor of the leading news magazine, Fokus. ‘But we now have a political class who don’t realise quite how elitist they are. People turn to the Sweden Democrats, not because they are racist, it’s because they see it as the only party that thinks like they do.’
The other parties accuse the Sweden Democrats of scare tactics. ‘They are painting a very dark picture of Sweden but we need to have faith in the future,’ says Annie Loof, the leader of the (centre-Right) Centre Party.
I meet her at the studios of TV4, Sweden’s equivalent of ITV, where four of the eight main party leaders have come for a live, onair grilling. Here, too, is Jonas Sjostedt, leader of the Left Party, who called themselves ‘The Communists’ until 1990, another extremist party enjoying a surge in the polls. A former Volvo shop steward and Jeremy Corbyn fan, Jonas tells me that he has Momentum activists on his campaign team and will be speaking at the Labour Party conference.
Perhaps Labour will adopt Jonas’s latest vote-winner: a plan to cut the working day from eight to six hours (that should do wonders for Sweden’s public sector bill). Yet the main media focus at this debate is on the leader of Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson. Just 39, he joined the party as a teenager, wears a trim beard and Harry Potter glasses and is both wary and weary of journalists.
Each day brings fresh scandals about his party — today it’s an MP fiddling his expenses — to which he retorts that no other party is subjected to the same scrutiny. I ask him how
‘If you are a migrant here you should become Swedish’
it feels to be the man who has made this the most unSwedish election in history.
‘It’s not my ambition to be that guy. They have given me that role,’ he says but his message is uncompromising: ‘If you’re an immigrant, you should become Swedish and be Swedish.’ He rejects comparisons with other extreme European parties — ‘I think we have more of a Nordic society. I don’t think I have that much in common with Le Pen [leader of the French National Front] or AfD [Germany’s hard Right]’ — and tries to present his party as a Swedish uKIP.
‘I’ve met Nigel Farage,’ he says, adding that he likes a pint of British beer and favours a referendum on Eu membership, though ‘Swexit’ is not a burning issue now.
Swedes are not sure whether to be flattered or dismayed that the world is taking such an interest in their election.
Today, it remains a delightful place to visit, astonishingly expensive — £9 for a ham sandwich — but also obsessively house-proud. Even walking around a council estate in Rinkeby, the notorious immigrants- only Stockholm district routinely described as a ‘no-go zone’, I fail to spot any graffiti. What’s more, someone has mown neat stripes across the communal lawn. Just days before there was a shooting on the same spot.
What makes this election stranger still is that the economy is in rude health. unemployment is at a historic low. The ruling Social Democrats should be way out in front. Instead, they face their worst result since World War I.
‘Young people have just forgotten how hard life used to be and how much we have achieved,’ says retired therapist, Inger Hettman, a despairing Social Democrat supporter whom I meet in the town of Nykvarn.
I talk to a number of voters on both the Left and Right who say they are considering a vote for the Sweden Democrats.
Few wish to be named, of course. But Leif, an engineer from Lulea, sums up a common view. He says: ‘I think they are asking the right questions. I’m just not sure whether they would provide the right answers.’
Back in Rinkeby, I ask the local MP why Sweden is so divided. Amir Adan, 33, is halfSomali, half- Swedish and belongs to the Moderates, Sweden’s Tories.
‘Four years ago, we didn’t talk about immigration at all while the only party that did was the Sweden Democrats,’ he says. ‘We should all have talked about it more.’
They are certainly talking about it now.