On Sunday, the Swedish Social Democrats won 28 percent of the vote whilethe far-right
Sweden Democrats won 17.6 percent of the vote in its best ever result.
Many analysts have noted that the Sweden Democrats have used demagoguery about the large flow of refugees that have arrived in Sweden to attempt to increase their political support. The party has made three different complaints: that migration is increasing crime, that it is increasing economic pressures on the country, and that the largely Muslim immigrants are undermining the country’s secularism and national unity.
While there is no evidence that the refugees are responsible for a major increase in overall crime, there has been intense media focus on acts of violence by some immigrants.
These attacks, along with complaints about economic pressures and culture, have helped shift Sweden’s wider political climate to the right. As one example, Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats, the country’s center-left party, has campaigned on reducing the number of refugees granted asylum in the country. Both the center-left and center-right parties moved to the right on immigration, under pressure from the Sweden Democrats. Faced with growing support for the Sweden Democrats, the Social Democrats focused much of their campaign on issues such as immigration and crime, where the far-right controls the narrative. And rather than countering the Sweden Democrats’ anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric with a vision of their own, the liberals shifted to the right with proposals that included sending the army into neighborhoods with high crime rates. The number of killings has risen in recent years, but there were still only 113 murders last year out of a population of nearly 10 million people,
“They adopted the Sweden Democrats’ agenda because they were afraid of losing voters,”
said Ulf Bjereld, a professor at Gothenburg University and an active member of the Social Democrats. “It was a political mistake.”
The researchers note that their “analysis does not show a link between direct exposure to immigration and support for the radical right.” In fact, the “2002-2014 rise of the Sweden Democrats coincides with a higher tolerance for immigration of the average Swede.” They are careful to note that they are not entirely precluding the conclusion that immigration may contribute to the party’s growing electoral strength. They write. “Perhaps most importantly, economic pressures may make people more receptive toward political messages that emphasize the fiscal costs of immigration and the latent redistribution from foreign to native-born by restricting it.” In other words, it’s not that the Sweden Democrat voters despise immigrants, but when a party scapegoats immigrants, that messaging may be viewed as a signal that the party at least recognizes the underlying problem — economic stagnation.
What if the rise of the Sweden Democrats has less to do with exposure to immigration, and more to do with rising inequality, driven by austerity and financial shocks? In a paper released last month, five Swedish academics examined the factors driving the performance of the Sweden Democrats between their marginal status in 2002 to becoming Sweden’s third-largest party in 2014. They looked not only at the voters who backed the Sweden Democrats, but also the politicians they elected. Part of the Sweden Democrats’ appeal is their claim to be outsiders. The researchers found that more than 96 percent of the party’s politicians elected going back to 1982 have never been elected for another party.
But what about their voters? The researchers lumped them into two large categories: “insiders” with stable employment and “outsiders” with unstable or no employment. The former category is also broken down between “vulnerable insiders,” whose jobs are at higher risk of automation versus “secure insiders” who don’t face the same risk. The results of their regression analysis “strongly indicate that the Sweden Democrats gained the most votes in municipalities where outsiders faced the largest drop in incomes relative to insiders, and where there was a larger fraction of vulnerable insiders who risked losing their jobs in the financial-crisis recession. The associations are statistically precise and quantitatively non-trivial.” The trend is present in both municipal-level results for parliamentary elections and for municipal council elections
“If nobody is talking about stuff that people see as problems, the only answers and understanding that they’re going to have are the ones offered by the populist parties. That’s what you basically had in Sweden,” said Sheri Berman, a professor of politics at Barnard College. Rather than copying the far-right’s emotional appeals toward identity and its criticism of the state, mainstream parties should offer voters fresh alternatives, Berman said.
“What happens is that xenophobia, racism, anti-immigration ideas become more recognized
and legitimate ... because the big parties, the power-holding parties are jumping on them,”
said Emilia Palonen, an expert on populism at the University of Helsinki. “These mainstream parties should be bringing in new issues, new excitement into politics, and instead they’re following.”
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