Swedes go to polls amid surge in support for anti-immigrant party
● Election first since 163,000 asylum seekers were allowed in
Sweden went to the polls yesterday in a general election that is expected to be one of the most unpredictable and thrilling races there for decades amid heated debate on immigration.
The election will be Sweden’s first since the government allowed 163,000 migrants into the country in 2015.
While that is far fewer than what Germany took in that year, it was the most per capita of any European nation.
“This election is a referendum about our welfare,” prime minister Stefan Lofven said. “It’s also about decency, about a decent democracy … and not letting the Sweden Democrats, an extremist party, a racist party, get any influence in the government.”
About 7.5 million registered voters chose from almost 6,300 candidates for a fouryear term in the 349-seat Riksdag, or parliament.
It is highly unlikely that any party will get a majority, or 175 seats.
The latest opinion poll conducted by Novus for public broadcaster SVT suggested on Friday that Mr Lofven’s ruling Social Democrats would lose seats but still emerge as the party with the most votes with an estimated 24.9 percent of the vote.
If that happened, it would be a historical low for the traditional left-wing party, which has dominated Swedish politics since the Second World War.
The poll showed that the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats led by Jimmie Akesson would get 19.1 per cent of votes in what would be a major increase compared with the 13 per cent they received in 2014. The centre-right Moderate Party is set to take to take third place with 17.7 per cent.
With a steady rise in popularity of the Sweden Democrats, immigration has been the hot topic of the election.
The party, rooted in a neonazi movement, has tried to soften its image and has played a role in breaking down long-standing taboos on what Swedescouldsayopenlyabout immigration and integration without being shunned as racists.
During a heated debate of party leaders on Friday, Mr Akesson caused a stir by blaming migrants for the difficulties they often have in finding employment and not adjusting to Sweden.
The broadcaster that aired
the debate, SVT, afterwards called his remarks degrading and against the democratic mandate of public broadcasting. Mr Akesson responded by saying that state television should not take sides and announced that he wouldn’t take part in any of SVT’S election programmes.
At a party rally on Saturday, he strongly criticised Mr Lofven’s government for “prioritising” the cause of asylum seekers.
“This government we have had now ... they have priori- tised, during these four years, asylum seekers,” Mr Akesson said, giving an exhaustive list of things he says the government has failed to do for Swedish society because of migrants.
He added: “Sweden needs breathing space, we need tight, responsible immigration policies.”
Mr Akesson’s strong rhetoric has shocked many Swedes since the country has a long tradition of helping those in need.
“Terrible! I just want to cry when I think about it,” said Veronica Lundqvist, referring to the Sweden Democrats after she left a voting booth in Stockholm. “They say awful things. I mean, of course we have a lot of refugees here, but we need to take care of them. They come from a terrible place, terrible wars. We can’t just throw them out.”
But others say the Sweden Democrats are trying to fix a historical problem.
“It’s an integration issue,” Karl Ljung said at the voting station.
Is Sweden lurching to the right? Yesterday’s general election will doubtless show a rise in support for the far-right Sweden Democrats, led by Jimmie Akesson. Several opinion polls placed them second, behind the Social Democratparty –thetraditional party of government – and ahead of the centre-right Moderates.
The prospect of such a political shift has made headlines across the world. Of course, every country is grappling with the same problem: public hostility to immigration in the aftermath of wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and beyond. But let’s be honest. There’s also a good deal of schadenfreude about Sweden’s predicament. This country of almost ten million people has created one of the world’s most equal societies since the Social Democrats first came to power in 1917. While other countries such as Britain have found it almost impossible to control or regulate capitalism, the Swedes have made big strides. As a result, their income gap is the world’s smallest; their childcare and maternity/paternity care are excellent and their elderly care is widely regarded as the best in the world. On a trip to Sweden’s southern province of Skane, industrialist and Swedish consul to Scotland Torvald Colliander took me to see the council-run old folk’s home where his mother lived and died. He proudly showed me his own name on the application list. “In Sweden,” he told me, “the only fear is that you won’t get into the council home and might have to go private instead.” Public services are that good. Consequently, private provision is rare, everyone uses the same school, doctor and dentist regardless of social background and the wealthy keep on paying tax.
So far it’s worked. The Swedes have been the living embodiment of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level, which demonstrates that everyone benefits from an equal society, including the rich. Additionally, the Swedes have the highest rates of innovation in the EU and union membership is three times higher than in Scotland.
In short, the Swedes have been at the top of every international league table for decades – provoking admiration, envy and outright hostility in almost equal measure.
In 1960, American president Dwight Eisenhower said Sweden’s welfare state had led the country into an orgy of sex, socialism and suicide. In fact, Sweden was the only country to rival the GDP of post-war America, so it was politically inconvenient to discover that a tiny Nordic nation was evolving a more humane Third Way between the command economy and the unfettered free market.
Some of Eisenhower’s mud stuck and, over the years, politicians in less equal societies have grown weary of Sweden’s apparently effortless social and economic
success. So there’s a smug wee smile now that Sweden is suffering from an ugly outbreak of the same racism, intolerance and hostility experienced by other countries with lower standards and more wobbly moral compasses. It seems that, under pressure, the Swedes react no better than anyone else. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from politicians, TV viewers and even activists.
But Sweden’s predicament is not quite so simple.
There is absolutely no parallel between the number of refugees and economic migrants accepted into Sweden and any other country – not in Germany and most definitely not in the UK.
In 2015, one in six people living in Sweden was born outside the country. That’s a dramatic change from the almost totally homogenous, white society that prevailed in Sweden until the 1960s. Like the other Nordic nations, the Swedes had no empire, Commonwealth or experience of different ethnicities arriving gradually as economic migrants over a century as Britain did. Instead, Swedish society changed fairly rapidly – the first influx of refugees came after the Yugoslavian conflict and then, in 2014, the country accepted 80,000 mostly Syrian asylum seekers – proportionally more than any other country in Europe. That produced other problems, many of them peculiar to Sweden’s high skills economy.
In 2015, 35,000 children arrived in Sweden as asylum seekers without parents. Families in wartorn countries heard Sweden was giving permanent residence permits to all Syrians seeking asylum and many managed to scrape the money together to send over one child apiece. That child was often a teenager, without a word of Swedish.
In Britain, by contrast, migrants and asylum seekers arrive with a basic grasp of English and can find casual jobs without qualifications. Essentially, Britain’s world of low-pay, zero-hour contracts means immigrants can get a start. New arrivals in Sweden, by contrast, often cannot, which leads to unemployment and housing segregation. Still, the “refugee crisis” is not a part of everyday life. Society hasn’t collapsed and Swedes are still more welcoming to incomers than folk from other EU countries.
According to a Europe-wide survey published last year, 64 per cent of Swedes are positive to immigrants from outside the EU, compared with 37 per cent across the EU itself. So the big question is not whether the Sweden Democrats will increase their vote but whether that gives them any meaningful political clout. Every other party has rejected the idea of forming a coalition, and while that may create awkward bedfellows among the other parties, there’s a strong incentive to make common cause. But while British voters are quite used to seeing large bodies of political opinion frozen out of power as a result of first-past-the-post voting, the Swedes, with their fully proportional voting system, are not. Will exclusion fuel support for the Sweden Democrats or will mainstream parties co-operate, contain the threat and devise innovative ways to boost integration? Despite support from prominent eugenicists in the Nazi era, farright ideology did not overtake Sweden in the 1940s. The Swedes can resist it again.
There’s a good deal of schadenfreude about Sweden’s predicament, writes Lesley Riddoch