Sweden’s election marks a new far-right surge in Europe
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.”
Sweden, national parliament election:
100% of districts counted
S-S&D: 30.3% (+2.0)
SD-ECR: 20.5% (+3.0)
M-EPP: 19.1% (-0.7)
V-LEFT: 6.7% (-1.3)
C-RE: 6.7% (-1.9)
KD-EPP: 5.3% (-1.0)
MP-G/EFA: 5.1% (+0.7)
L-RE: 4.6% (-0.9)+/- vs. 2018 election
➤ https://t.co/rsoqcYChNY pic.twitter.com/WC0LMCR1Zk
— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) September 15, 2022
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.
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.”
Far-right Italian politician Alessio Di Giulio posted a video last week with a Roma woman, telling voters that if they cast their ballots for the party in the election later this month they’ll “never see her again.”https://t.co/lO4OFSe5eV
— Axios (@axios) September 15, 2022
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.