The far right falls short
Don’t get too worked up over Sweden’s “new political reality,” said Nyheter (Sweden) in an editorial. Yes, the anti-immigrant, far-right Sweden Democrats took third place in last weekend’s elections, receiving a record 17.6 percent share of the vote. But that was far short of the result expected by many pundits, who predicted the party— which has neo-Nazi roots—would take well over 20 percent and place second. Experts were tricked into overestimating support for the Sweden Democrats by the fact that their voters “scream so loudly.” With its opposition to the European Union and almost all forms of immigration, the party is little more than an adolescent tantrum, “a collective political puberty” that blames foreigners and elites for everything so no one else has to take responsibility for anything. But this far-right pitch failed at the ballot box because the “vast majority of voters are still in the middle.” The governing Social Democrats received 28.4 percent of the vote, the highest share for any individual party, and together with its center-left coalition partners took 40.6 percent. The center-right Moderates came in second with 19.8 percent, and their bloc received 40.3 percent. Sweden and its democracy “are still greater than the Sweden Democrats.”
Swedes are trying to downplay the election results, said Kjetil Hanssen in Aftenposten (Norway), but the rightward shift was clear. Every major political party lost votes except the Sweden Democrats, who have soared from less than 6 percent of the vote in 2010 to nearly 18 percent today. The party leeched support from mainstream parties on the left and right by promising to protect Sweden’s welfare state—for Swedes— while getting tough on immigrants. Tellingly, “if only men had voted,” the Sweden Democrats would have been in first place. These results are a reaction to Europe’s 2015 immigration crisis, when Sweden took in 163,000 mostly Muslim migrants, more per capita that any other European country. Since then, Swedes have been shaken by high-profile crimes committed by immigrants, including gang shootings and an ISIS-inspired truck rampage that killed five in Stockholm. Nearly one-third of voters now say that the Sweden Democrats, who advocate a moratorium on new asylum seekers and a tougher path to citizenship, have “the best refugee and immigration policy.”
The irony, said Peter Kadhammar in Aftonbladet (Sweden), is that the election’s winner is also “the biggest loser.” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s Social Democrats party dropped 2.8 percentage points, for its worst showing in a century. Nearly 60 percent of the electorate voted against the ruling coalition Lofven leads, and he will likely resign as prime minister. Haggling will now begin over a new coalition, said David Ahlin in Sydsvenskan (Sweden), and it’s highly unlikely that the next government will include the Sweden Democrats. That’s because this vote wasn’t really about immigration: It was about the Sweden Democrats and whether they should be “given power and influence.” A large majority of Sweden’s voters “have answered with an unequivocal ‘No.’”