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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: What would a Sweden Democrats backed government look like?

With opinion polls suggesting the nationalist Sweden Democrats could become the largest force in a right-wing coalition, David Crouch asks how the party might behave in power

OPINION: What would a Sweden Democrats backed government look like?
Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson holds a press conference in Eskilstuna. Photo: Per Karlsson/TT

Ella is frightened. Well dressed and with perfect hair, she is a successful immigrant to Sweden – an East European of Jewish descent who has joined Sweden’s comfortable middle class.

“The fascists are growing everywhere and are coming to power in Sweden,” she says, stoney-faced. “Is history repeating itself?” History for Ella means the gas chambers, and for her, today’s fascists are the Sweden Democrats (SD).

I was taken unawares by Ella’s outburst and my reassurances sounded unconvincing. But I was less surprised by her confusion and fear. Prime minister Magdalena Andersson herself has accused the SD of being neo-fascist, and the insult is commonly bandied about by prominent figures on the centre-left. So, having now had time to think, here is what I feel I should have said to Ella.

In early 2000, there was international uproar when Austria’s conservatives formed a ruling coalition with the far-right Freedom Party, whose leader in the 1950s was a former officer of the Waffen SS. Condemnation was widespread, and both the USA and Israel recalled their ambassadors to Vienna.

Twenty-two years later, there is no such outrage when far-right, nationalist and right-populist parties win government positions – their presence on the political scene has become mainstream. Once censured as pariahs, they are increasingly considered suitable partners for governing coalitions.

In this sense, Sweden is following a trend in Europe. Far-right parties have entered governments from Italy to Norway, and the world has not stopped spinning as a result.

In the Nordic region, Sweden is behind the curve. In Norway, the Progress Party has frequently polled over 25 percent, and from 2013 to 2020 governed the country together with the centre-right Conservatives. For periods, the PP controlled the ministries of justice, finance, energy, transport, agriculture, labour and – wait for it – equality. The party’s most notorious former member is the Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.

The far-right Danish People’s Party became Denmark’s second largest party around a decade ago. DPP backing after the 2015 general election enabled a minority Liberal government to hold office and enact some of the strictest asylum and immigration policies in Western Europe. In Finland, the anti-immigrant True Finns (now the Finns Party) joined a centre-right coalition government in 2015.

The recent electoral success of far-right parties in the Nordics has contributed to policies and rhetoric hostile to asylum seekers and Muslims. But these parties have also been subject to the democratic process and been voted out of office. In Denmark and Finland they have been burned by their experience of power, with a collapse and splintering of their vote.

If the right bloc wins next weekend’s Swedish election, how much influence could the Sweden Democrats demand? What might be the direction of a government that relies for its survival on their support?

The other parties in Sweden’s loose centre-right bloc – the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals – say they will exclude the SD from ministerial positions. But recent polls suggest the SD could out-perform the Moderates and become Sweden’s second party. In any case, the SD is likely to extract a high political price for its backing.

“On issues of migration, crime and sentencing, culture and international collaboration, this can drive a [centre-right coalition] government further to the right,” says Ewa Sternberg, political commentator for the liberal Dagens Nyheter. One might say “even further to the right” – pressure from the SD has already seen a substantial rightward shift in the Swedish mainstream.

Coalitions demand compromises. Government is messy and resistant to clear ideological commitments, let alone extreme ones. When The Local recently visited Sölvesborg, where the SD runs the local administration, it expected to find tension and polarisation, but instead encountered little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders.

But what of the SD’s historical roots in the Nazi movement, recently confirmed by the party itself? What about the stream of media exposés – which always accelerates around election time – revealing individual Sweden Democrat politicians as holocaust deniers, Muslim baiters, Nazi sympathisers, homophobes and old-style racists? What about the party’s talk, as recently as 2019, of “inherited essence” (nedärvd essens), smacking of 1930s race biology?

Although leaders such as Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson joined the party in the mid-1990s when its umbilical chord with National Socialism had not been cut, they have tried to exclude the neanderthal element, at one point kicking out the entire youth organisation for being too extreme. This has led some to argue that the Sweden Democrats have transcended their extremist roots and are now right-wing populists, just like other similar parties all over Europe. 

However, while direct connections at the level of ideas between the party and outright Nazis might now be weak, cultural connections are still strong. Some of the popular songs sung at big SD events, for example, are straight from the Swedish white power movement.

And where the party seeks to take root, extremist weeds also seem to flourish. The magazine ETC obtained recently a document with a list of words banned by the party from the comment sections of its social media channels. This is a glossary of extreme right conspiracies and racial hatred, suggesting that the party attracts a milieu in which these ways of thinking are commonplace. 

This poses the question whether the party has the potential to radicalise even further to the right, pulling its coalition partners with it. In Poland and Hungary, for example, conservative parties have become authoritarian in power, gutting democratic institutions and turning them into compliant puppets. Could something similar happen in Sweden? 

I think this is extremely unlikely. Poland and Hungary have recent histories of totalitarianism, their democratic traditions are weak. By contrast, Sweden’s history of political pluralism has deep and active roots in society. When the Nordic Resistance Movement made the mistake of trying to march to a synagogue in Gothenburg in 2017, it seemed as if the entire city came out to oppose them.  

So Ella, please don’t be frightened. We live in a scary world of wars and climate catastrophes, and there are worrying developments in politics on both the left and right. But Sweden is a stable democracy and will remain so regardless of the outcome of next week’s elections.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

Member comments

  1. This is a shocking article, written from a naively privileged perspective of someone who feels he personally has nothing to fear from the rise of the far right. “The world hasn’t stopped turning so dont worry your pretty head” is both patronising and blind to the real injustice, intolerance oppression that migrants and descendants are already dealing with. His blithe false equivalence of “people on the left and right” is straight out of the Trump playbook and reveals his real politics. I’m very disappointed that The Local saw fit to publish this. Please do read this kind of thing through carefully before publishing in future…

  2. Many thanks for your comment. This is David, who wrote the article. First, it is not true that I personally have nothing to fear from the rise of the far right. My family is Jewish. Ella is my relative. Second, the article is a specific response to Ella’s fear that fascism is on the verge of coming to power in Sweden, not more generally about the racism experienced by immigrants in Sweden (and not just from the far right). For that, see the section devoted to this in my book, or my article in The Local (May 16): “The far right now dominates the immigration debate in Sweden.” The article above makes no blithe equivalence between people on the left and right — I personally am worried that certain people on the left support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And I hope you are too.

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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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