Exit polls suggest that the far right has not made much progress in Sweden’s elections.
The current minority Social Democratic government and its parliamentary allies are on course for a three-seat majority, according to polling station research by Swedish television’s SVT. The poll also suggests that the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) are now the country’s second-largest political party, with potentially more than 20% of the vote and overtaking the centre-right moderates for the first time.
A conclusive result won’t be known until early Monday morning, and if the race is particularly tight, the final tally may not come until midweek. Small changes in voter support among the eight main parliamentary parties could still determine whether the next government is led by the left or the right.
For the first time, the main centre-right parties embraced cooperation with the SD, which had previously been treated as a pariah. The SD emerged from Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement in the mid-1990s and is still struggling to shake off accusations of extremism.
The election has revealed that Sweden is a nation deeply uncomfortable with immigration, with the SD able to exploit fears about violent crime to shift the political debate to the right.
In the middle of the campaign, the SD billed a subway train decorated with its electoral colors as a “repatriation express”. “Welcome aboard with a one-way ticket. Next stop, Kabul,” tweeted the party’s legal spokesman, highlighting the SD’s demand to return non-European immigrants from where they came.
Issues that topped the list of voters’ concerns, such as rising energy prices, failing schools and long health care lines, were drowned out by a relentless focus on immigration, in an election campaign somewhat cut short by the war in Ukraine and Sweden’s subsequent decision to join NATO. .
The electoral debate was also marked by gang violence. Two weeks ago, a woman and her five-year-old son were injured after being caught in the crossfire in Eskilstuna, west of Stockholm. In Malmö a week earlier, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed a gang leader in a shopping mall. The number of fatal shootings rose sharply to 34 in the first six months of this year, up from 20 in the same period in 2021.
Party leaders on the left and right vied with each other to link the rise in violent crime to large-scale immigration, which has led to high levels of ethnic segregation in the housing and labor markets. In just a few decades, Sweden has become one of the most multicultural societies in Europe, with more than a third of the population having been born abroad or having a foreign-born parent. Around 30% of children do not have Swedish as their mother tongue, reaching 45% in some parts of the cities.
Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson, the acting prime minister, said Sweden should not have “Somali towns” with a high density of ethnic minority people, while its immigration minister proposed that the proportion of towns “non-Nordic” should be limited to certain areas, echoing moves by Danish social democrats to forcibly expel non-European immigrants from so-called ghettos. The Social Democrats have lost working-class voters to the far right, which is now the biggest party among men in the main trade union confederation.
In a spiraling spiral of proposals, the Moderate Party’s legal spokesman suggested ADHD tests for five-year-olds in immigration areas, because “in the country’s prisons there is a large representation of people with ADHD”. The party has also lost voters to the SD.
Anyone living in an immigrant area had become a problem, remarked Ewa Sternberg, respected political correspondent for the liberal Dagens Nyheter: “It’s hard to believe that these parties would have come up with proposals like these 10 years ago.”
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This was the first time that migration and ethnic minority people had become the focus of a general election in Sweden, thanks to the growing influence of the SD, said Tobias Hübinette, professor of intercultural studies at the University from Karlstad. “You could say that Sweden has caught up with the rest of Europe in this regard,” he said.
Elsewhere in the Nordic region, anti-immigrant parties such as the Danish People’s Party, the Progress party in Norway and the True Finns in Finland have entered into coalition or support relationships with the dominant centre-right. But each has subsequently had its support shattered, broken or even decimated by proximity to power.
The problems experienced by immigrants in Sweden were previously discussed in terms of shortcomings of the Swedish model, but now the immigrants themselves had become the problem, said Jonas Hinnfors, professor of politics at the University of Gothenburg.
“Immigration and crime became much more important in this election campaign, partly because the reality changed, but also because the main parties felt threatened by the Sweden Democrats,” he said. “Policy has moved into areas where you’re not just tough on crime and in favor of less immigration, but where you connect those two areas.”