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POLITICS

ANALYSIS: Has the far-right become normalised in Sweden?

Does the Liberal Party's decision to open the door to working with the Sweden Democrats indicate a shift in Swedish politics ahead of the 2022 election? The Local speaks with two political analysts to find out what's going on.

ANALYSIS: Has the far-right become normalised in Sweden?
Sweden Democrat party leader Jimmie Åkesson. Photo: Carl-Olof Zimmerman/TT

The Liberal party in Sweden caused a stir just before Easter after it approved a bid to campaign for a centre-right government in next-year’s election. With 59 votes to 31, the Liberal Party’s national committee agreed to the proposal put forward by party leader Nyamko Sabuni. 

Although collaborating with the Moderate Party and Christian Democrats who make up the bulk of Swedish conservatives is not new, this could potentially mean working with the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, with roots in neo-Nazi movements, after next year’s election.

So will it become the new norm to work with the far-right in Swedish politics?

Sociology professor Jens Rydgren at Stockholm University says that despite the deep friction within the Liberal party on this issue, it is not surprising that they agreed to the proposal due to Sabuni’s role as leader. Sabuni, a former equality and integration minister, was elected leader of the party in June 2019.

“She was very clear from the start that she preferred the Moderate party as the governing party, and she has pushed for the Liberals to take a stance on that. So it [the result] didn’t really come as a surprise, there have been signs of this since 2018, but especially since the election of the party leader,” he says.

The Moderate party and Christian Democrats have previously declared that they are willing to work with the Sweden Democrats. This would enable the right-wing (borgerliga) parties to form a government with the support of the Sweden Democrats, similar to how centre-left Social Democrat Prime Minister Stefan Löfven previously managed to form a government supported by the Centre Party and Liberal Party.

This has already led to further normalisation of the Sweden Democrats, Rydgren says, as it has legitimised the party for many voters. The Sweden Democrats are characterised as a regular party to negotiate with.

“Above all it has led to a situation where the Moderates and Christian Democrats have toned down the opinions that separate them from the Sweden Democrats. They haven’t been interested in highlighting the areas of conflict, but have tried to play it down, and in some sense maybe tried to strengthen the picture of the Sweden Democrats as a regular party.”

Rydgren says it is not a wild guess that this is also how the Liberal party will interact with the Sweden Democrats from now on. He predicts the party will try to emphasise the consensus that exists with the populist party within some policy areas.

“So in that regard, yes, it has led to a normalisation of the Sweden Democrats.”

But there is a complex future ahead for anyone looking to form a right-wing government after next year’s elections.

“There will be tough negotiations and it is reasonable to assume that the Sweden Democrats will continue to sharpen their political programme, to go in an even more radical direction, which will be costly, especially for the Liberals, to agree to those things.”

The leaders of the Christian Democrats (Ebba Busch) and Moderates (Ulf Kristersson), with Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson in the background. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

Is folkhem the reason?

Ov Cristian Norocel, lecturer at Lund University, agrees that party leader Sabuni has had an important role to play in the recent developments.

“It seems Sabuni is calculating with an electoral advancement in the coming elections for these borgerliga parties, though she seems committed to ignore that the Sweden Democrats would play an important role in that context,” he says.

The populists party’s support remains high in Sweden.

“If we were to rely on the polls, the Sweden Democrats have the potential to become the third largest political force in the Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen), while the Liberal Party would need to fight really hard to ensure it passes the threshold,” Norocel says.

Across Europe far-right parties have seen electoral success over the past years. Controversially, the Sweden Democrats have their roots in the neo-Nazi movement in the 1980s, setting them apart even from many other similar parties across the continent.

Calls have been made to stop the normalisation of far-right politics. For example, Annie Lööf, the leader of the Centre Party – also a small centrist-liberal party that otherwise has a lot in common with its Liberal colleagues – wrote on Facebook that she “regretted that the Liberals had chosen to open the door to an anti-liberal and xenophobic party”. Nyamko Sabuni herself discussed her experience battling racism throughout her career in a speech to her party during the same meeting where the controversial proposal was voted through.

But there has also been a general political shift to the right in Sweden, including centre-left parties such as the governing Social Democrats taking an increasingly tougher stance on migration issues. 

“The Sweden Democrats have also managed to benefit from the fact that the other conservative forces in the Swedish parliament, the Moderate Party and Christian Democrats, have moved further to the right in the past years,” Norocel says.

So how have the Sweden Democrats managed to establish themselves as a major political force? Norocel’s research argues that the party has managed to claim ownership over the Swedish concept of folkhem (people’s home). A concept that for decades was used by the Social Democrats to pursue a progressive political programme that eventually led to Swedish society enjoying some of the highest levels of equality and development.

“The Sweden Democrats claimed to be the only political party interested in defending this home of Swedish people, thus setting protection of native Swedes against what they claim to be dangerous migrants,” he says. “[Sweden Democrat leader] Jimmie Åkesson has gone so far to claim that if Per Albin Hansson, an influential Social Democrat leader and Swedish prime minister [1932-1946], would be alive today, he would be a Sweden Democrat member.”

But cleaning up its act is not an easy feat for the party.

“One cannot ignore the fact that accusations of racism and Islamophobia among Sweden Democrat party members have followed the Sweden Democrats even after Jimmie Åkesson’s repeated reassurances that the party has left its extreme right past behind,” Norocel says.

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

With the think tank linked to the Sweden Democrats openly recruiting the next generation of far-right social media 'influencers', why is Sweden so complacent about moves to shift public opinion to the radical right, asks The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

The radical right in Sweden is at least open about what it’s trying to do.

The homepage of Oikos, the think tank set up by Mattias Karlsson, the former right-hand man of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, is currently recruiting the first 15 of “a new generation” of “conservative” online propagandists. 

The think tank – whose controlling foundation has been criticised for refusing to reveal the true origin of 5 million kronor in funding – this week launched its new Illustra Academy, which aims to train an army of young, far-right “creators” to help win over minds on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Successful applicants, it promises, will get the chance “to meet leading actors in social media and digital political influencing”.

They will get “mentorship from established political influencers”, build “valuable contacts with influencers, digital opinion-makers, creatives, politicians and possible future employers”, and meet “businesses, political organisations, communications agencies and media actors”. 

This programme is being set up by Andreas Palmlöv, one of the many top Sweden Democrats who went to the US after Donald Trump was elected president to work for an increasingly radicalised Republican Party, serving as an intern for the former Speaker of Congress Kevin McCarthy.

After his return to Sweden, Palmlöv was photographed meeting Gregg Keller, a US lobbyist he says he met through the Leadership Institute, an organisation backed by a who’s who of US billionaire donors which has over the past ten years spent 8 million kronor training up young “conservatives” in Europe.

Karlsson, Åkesson’s former right-hand man, has even closer links to the US, holding at least one meeting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and attending the wedding of the pro-Trump US conservative media profile Candace Owens in 2019.   

As a British citizen, I’m perhaps overly sensitive about the influence of conservative, libertarian donors and their think tanks, and of the efforts to use social media to push public opinion towards the radical right. 

Vote Leave, which led the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, started its life at 55 Tufton Street, the townhouse near the UK Parliament where the country’s most powerful “dark money” think tanks are based, while Matthew Elliot, its chief executive, was a Tufton Street veteran. 

Since the UK left the EU, the ruling Conservative Party has been increasingly captured by these think tanks and their wealthy backers.   

Ministers, former ministers and Conservative MPs now happily speak alongside radical right figures at lavish conferences like the National Conservatism UK conference part-funded by Christian pro-Trump US foundations, or the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference part-funded by Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the two billionaires who are the most open and prominent funders of attempts to shift the UK to the radical, libertarian right. 

Conservative MPs and former ministers have over the past two years been paid a total of £600,000 (8 million kronor) to appear on GB News, the Fox News clone jointly owned by Marshall and Chandler.

The Legatum Institute, Chandler’s own think tank, pretty much dictated the UK’s Brexit policy while Boris Johnson was prime minister, while during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, the Tufton Street think tanks supplied much of her team.

When her attempt to drive through their radical libertarian economic programme blew up spectacularly, she was forced to resign. But they haven’t given up, with Truss returning in February with the new Popular Conservatism group. 

I had always believed that the UK politics was immune to US levels of big donor influence, that the Conservative Party could never go the way of the Republican Party in the US, and it turns out I was wrong. 

So is that same naivety playing out in Sweden? 

The Oikos think tank has already started hosting international conservative conferences along the lines of ARC, with a conference at the Sundbyholms Slott castle outside Eskilstuna last year. 

When Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson raised questions earlier this year about the funding of Henrik Jönsson, a popular YouTube debater, she was sharply criticised by commentators of both left and right for seeking to smear a critic without providing evidence

But in the US, there are billionaire-funded ‘educational’ YouTube channels like PragerU that follow a very similar format to Jönsson’s. Jönsson’s videos reliably follow the same talking points, questioning whether global warming is really causing extreme weather, spread disinformation about wind farms, call for Sweden’s public broadcasters to be abolished, and claim migrants have trashed the economy. 

And when a donor last year asked Gunnar Strömmer, now Sweden’s Justice Minister, how to give 350,000 kronor to the Moderates without having to identify himself under party financing laws, in part of a sting by TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme, Strömmer advised him to give it directly to right-wing “opinion-makers”, meaning, presumably, people like Jönsson. 

Despite the uproar, Jönsson has never explicitly denied receiving funding from outside organisations, only that such funding does not influence his output. 

“I am quite open about the fact that I willingly take money from all decent organisations and private individuals,” he told the Dagens ETC newspaper, while declining to give any further details. “But no one controls what I say,” he added. 

He has admitted that the website for his Energiupproret campaign, which blamed green policy and the shutdown of nuclear power stations for high power prices in the run-up to the 2022 election, was built by Näringslivets Mediaservice, a right wing social media outfit the precise funding of which was always unclear, although it was linked to Stiftelsen Svenskt Näringsliv, a foundation set up partly by the Confederation of Swedish Industry. 

The founders of Oikos’ new influencer education programme would probably argue that nothing is stopping the political left and centre from raising funds to train up young social media influencers in exactly the same way. 

Left-wing parties are not above taking donations. Approached by the same donor as part of the Kalla Fakta undercover report, representatives of the centre-left Social Democrats – as well as the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats on the right – also recommended ways around party finance laws.

But do we really want the UK or Sweden to follow the path the US has taken in recent decades, where a handful of billionaires with radical right opinions have aggressively pumped money into think tanks and media outfits and so succeeded in pushing one of the main parties towards previously fringe political opinions? 

It didn’t need to be this way.

When Sweden was developing its new party financing laws back in 2016, experts warned the then government must not to allow the identity of donors to be hidden behind foundations, the key method used by so-called dark money in the US, but the loophole was left open by the law.

It’s not just Oikos, which is funded by an opaque foundation, Insamlingsstiftelsen för Svensk Konservatism (The Fundraising Foundation for Swedish Conservatism), which uses this loophole. 

When caught in the sting by the Kalla Fakta programme, a Social Democrat also suggested that the donor set up a foundation to hide their identity. 

It may be that money from US billionaires, big companies, or indeed from other states, is not yet being spent in Sweden in a way that can alter the political landscape, but because neither think tanks nor influencers need to give much information about who funds them, it’s impossible to know. 

In the UK, the danger may soon be averted. No one seems to take the new outfit fronted by Liz Truss too seriously, and the general election later this year should offer the chance to clean up the country’s politics.  

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve come very close to losing my original homeland to the kind of political developments seen in the US. I don’t want to lose my adopted country too.

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