Friday, September 16, 2022

Sweden’s election marks a new far-right surge in Europe

Ishaan Tharoor - Yesterday 


Party leader of the Sweden Democrats Jimmie Akesson gives a speech during an election watch party at the Elite Hotel Marina Tower in Nacka, near Stockholm, on Sept. 11. (Stefan Jerrevang/TT News Agency/AP)

Another taboo in Europe is about to be broken. In Sweden, voters delivered a narrow mandate after elections on Sunday to a loose coalition of right-wing parties, including one with a neo-fascist past. On Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, a center-left Social Democrat allied to other left and green parties, conceded defeat. Her party had won 30 percent of the vote — making it still the single largest faction in parliament — but their coalition secured three fewer seats than their rivals to the right.

The kingmakers in Sweden are the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), a party founded in 1988 by ultranationalist extremists and neo-Nazis. Over the past decade, they have moved from the fringes of their country’s politics into the mainstream. This week, they secured some 20 percent of the Swedish vote, enough to make them the second-largest party in Sweden.

But they may not formally be in power. Such is the political stigma around them that they may remain technically outside a government led by the center-right Moderates and Liberals, yet crucially not in opposition. Coalition politics carry many complexities and wrangling over the new government may take weeks. Whatever the outcome, it seems the far-right SD believes it has a major seat at the table in a country long known for its progressive ethos and policies.

“Now we will get order in Sweden,” SD leader Jimmie Akesson wrote Wednesday on Facebook. “It is time to start rebuilding security, prosperity and cohesion. It’s time to put Sweden first.” Right-wing nationalists are marching into the future by rewriting the past

Akesson’s triumphalism has echoed across the continent. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally Party, hailed the SD’s success as a sign of nationalist resurgence. “Everywhere in Europe, people aspire to take their destiny back into their own hands!” she tweeted.


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Le Pen, of course, knows her share of false dawns, having been repeatedly thwarted in elections no matter incremental gains in defeat. But far-right parties have in the past decade been the beneficiaries of the collapse of the so-called “cordon sanitaire” set up by more mainstream parties to block them from winning power, entering governing coalitions in Swedish neighbor Finland, Austria and Italy. And even when not in government, their agendas have made their way into governance — the center-left government in Denmark, for example, checked right-wing nativism by adopting the anti-immigration policies of their rivals.

Italian elections later this month are expected to deliver perhaps the most emphatic victory for a European far-right party: The Brothers of Italy, which draws its origins from Italy’s neofascist movement, is currently leading in the polls and its leader, the charismatic Giorgia Meloni, is poised to be become prime minister with the backing of a number of other right-wing parties.

Akesson doesn’t have the political alliances that Meloni does but shares an antipathy toward migration, Islam and the spectral “globalist” establishment that far-right campaigners across the West have harnessed in their bids for power. “They don’t include Islam in Swedishness,” said Andrej Kokkonen, a professor of politics at the University of Gothenburg, to my colleagues. “You don’t get to be a Swede and a Muslim at the same time.”

“They have few new solutions for today’s destructive economic and environmental crises,” wrote Pankaj Mishra for Bloomberg Opinion about the far right. “They can, however, channel social unrest to their advantage by reheating identities of race, religion and ethnicity, and retailing myths of national greatness.” A far-right politician is poised to become Italy’s first female leader

Ahead of the election, Andersson pointed to the toxicity of the SD’s legacy. “ There are rightwing populist parties in many European countries, but the Sweden Democrats have deep roots in the Swedish neo-Nazis and other racist organizations in Sweden,” she said last week on the campaign trail in an interview with the Guardian, highlighting an alleged incident where SD campaigners celebrated the Nazi invasion of Poland during World War II. “I mean, it’s not like other parties.”

But that has hardly dented their appeal. The SD emerged as a major political force in Sweden, siphoning off rural votes that once would have gone to parties on the other side of the political spectrum. “Treating nationalists as pariahs has not prevented their rise,” observed the Economist. “On the contrary: elections in Europe now are often a case of loudly pitting the mainstream against the supposedly unpalatable and hoping that not too many voters pick the ‘wrong’ side. Simply hoping the nasties go away has not, in fact, made them go away.”

For more mainstream parties on the right, finding accommodation with the far right has become, in some instances, the only path to power. “If you want a government that is not based on the Social Democrats you need to cooperate with the SD,” said Anders Borg, a former finance minister for the Moderates, to my colleagues. “I cannot see any other viable election strategy.”

“In Sweden,” he added, “we isolated the SD and yet they grew to 20 percent as a lot of ordinary voters drifted toward them. At the same time, the SD has moved away from a fringe position toward being a more ordinary political party.”

That is the narrative surrounding other ascendant far-right parties in Europe, including Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Meloni angrily rejects accusations of fascism and has cast herself as part of the political mainstream — cooling her Euroskepticism, supporting sanctions against Russia and prioritizing, at least for now, economic relief for Italians over a hysterical culture war.

If the Italian right wins power, Meloni will have to translate all the years of populist rabble-rousing into effective governance. That’s no small matter given the thicket of problems facing her debt-ridden country. “I cannot say that, faced with such a responsibility, my hands aren’t shaking,” Meloni told my colleagues.


How a neo-Nazi movement became Sweden's kingmakers

Yesterday 

More than one in five Swedes voted for the radical anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) party in elections on Sunday.


Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Akesson delivers a speech to supporters following Sunday's vote© Getty Images

Now the second-largest political party in the country, its anticipated 73 MPs are expected to play a crucial role in supporting a ruling right-wing coalition - if not a formal position in the government itself.

It would be the first time the nationalist party has come anywhere close to the levers of power in Stockholm.

A focus during the election campaign on issues around immigration and violent crime have put the SD's agenda at the heart of mainstream Swedish politics like never before.

It is a watershed moment for a party founded by Nazi sympathisers, shunned for decades by the mainstream - and now on the cusp of playing a kingmaking role in a country better known for its stable and predictable politics.

According to the latest election figures, the SD won 20.6% of votes cast on Sunday - making it the largest in a bloc of right-wing parties now with a collective majority in parliament.

"This is dramatic given that they only entered parliament in 2010," University of Gothenburg political scientist Johann Martinsson told the BBC.

"Sweden used to have an extremely stable and predictable political party system. Three elections later - and they are the second largest party," he says.

Martinsson describes the party as "primarily an anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, nationalist party" - but stops short of labelling them far-right.


Supporters of the Sweden Democrats celebrate the results of an exit poll following Sunday's vote© Getty Images

Founded in 1988, the SD struggled for two decades to win enough votes to elect any MPs at all. But ever since entering parliament in 2010, the party has increased its share of three successive elections.

As of Sunday it had displaced the Moderates as the country's most popular right-of-centre party.

Martinsson says the results are a "dividing line" in Swedish history.

Its success has led to a fierce debate over how much the party has changed ideologically during its transformation from political pariah to power-broker.

Current leader Jimmie Akesson, who took over in 2005, unveiled a "zero-tolerance" policy against racism and extremism ten years ago - and in 2015 he even suspended the party's entire youth wing over its links to the far-right.

The party has also undergone an extensive rebranding: replacing its burning flame logo with a more innocent-looking flower and scrapping its "Keep Sweden Swedish" slogan.



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But those changes have not been enough to end the accusations that the party poses a threat to Sweden's minority groups.

They include Willie Silberstein, the chair of Sweden's Committee Against Anti-Semitism - who has himself become a target of anti-Semitic abuse in recent days after using his position to publicly criticise the SD in a television interview.

"The Committee has a problem with parties that were founded by Nazis. That is not an opinion - that is a piece of fact," he told the BBC. "If one party is so full of people that need to be excluded because they are Nazis - it says something about that party."

He points to a widely-reported study published last month by Swedish research group Acta Publica that claimed to have identified 289 politicians from the largest parties who had expressed views that could be deemed racist or even Nazi.

The vast majority of them - 214 - were members of SD.

"It scares me that they might have a big influence in Swedish politics," he says. "I think of not only the Jewish minority, but of immigrants in general."
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Tweets and social media posts from party members - and sometimes even elected officials - continue to get the party in trouble.

In the height of the election campaign SD's legal spokesperson, the 26-year-old MP Tobias Andersson, tweeted a picture of a Stockholm underground train branded with the party's colours.

"Welcome to the repatriation express. Here's a one-way ticket. Next Stop Kabul," he wrote.

Some Swedish commentators criticised the post but party leader Akesson refused to apologise, arguing that it was intended to mock those who were offended by the party's posters according to news agency AP.

The party denies the accusations of racism.

"All that was before I was born," says Emil Eneblad, vice chair of the SD's youth movement Young Swedes.

"People accused us of bad stuff in the election, I don't think the fact that there were shady people in the party 30 years ago has affected our election standing," the 21-year-old campaigner told the BBC.

He claims the party had almost doubled its support among young people in Sunday's election - something he credits with focusing on three issues in particular: safety, employment, and immigration.

"Young people are looking for something else," he says.

Political scientist Johann Martinsson says that issues around immigration have been simmering for a long time, pointing out that Sweden has received among the highest number of asylum seekers per capita in the world over the last few years.

This, and a perceived increase in violent crime may explain the surge in support for the SD, a party which has not only campaigned on both issues for years, but has rose to prominence with its controversial claim that the two are inextricably linked.



How a neo-Nazi movement became Sweden's kingmakers© BBC


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