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.