Another European country has seen an extreme right-wing party make big gains in an election. This time it’s Sweden. In last weekend’s general elections, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party passed the electoral threshold for the first time and won 20 seats in parliament.

However, the centre-right parties which won the election and the left-wing opposition are refusing to work with the Sweden Democrats. The political establishment hopes to prevent a breakthrough like the one achieved by Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands.

After the election results were released, party leader Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats said: “We made history today, it’s fantastic!!!” The 20 seats won by his party will not give him a big say in policy matters, but the results will put the immigration issue firmly on the political agenda. Mr Åkesson is very fond of pointing out that one in seven inhabitants of Sweden are of foreign descent.

It is difficult to resist the temptation to compare the Sweden Democrats with the Dutch Freedom Party. The Swedish party wants a radical reduction in immigration, a “complete stop on Islamisation” and a much stricter integration policy. Just like their Dutch counterpart, the Sweden Democrats accuse the political establishment of ignoring immigration-related problems.

Headache
The electoral success of the Sweden Democrats has left Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his centre-left coalition with a headache. He will not be able to form a right-wing majority because he refuses to cooperate with the extreme-right newcomers. And his attempts at persuading the Greens to leave the left-wing bloc have proved futile.

Marcel van Luijn, a Dutch entrepreneur active in local politics in a southern coastal resort in Sweden, argues that “the traditional parties have called this situation upon themselves by refusing to join the debate on immigration during the election campaign. He argues the new party’s gains are primarily psychological in nature.

”We shouldn’t exaggerate this. It’s not an election result comparable to Wilders’ in the Netherlands. It is just not on the same scale. However, it is a clear signal that not everybody agrees with the traditional parties. And that there is widespread dissatisfaction. So now immigration policy is on the agenda, and parties can no longer dodge the issue, as it is difficult to rule with a minority cabinet,” says Van Luijn.

He adds that the Sweden Democrats “are not all that bad” compared to other anti-immigration parties like the Freedom Party, Vlaams Belang in Belgium and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France. He believes these other parties are much more radical than the Sweden Democrats. “It’s just that Sweden is not used to having a party call immigration policy into question”.

Racist roots
Andreas Johansson Heinö, political scientist at the University of Göteborg, disagrees. “To some extent the Sweden Democrats are more radical. They originally were a racist party which evolved in the mid-1990s from racist organisations in Sweden. But during the last decade, they changed their policy considerably and today they are more of a nationalist party and less xenophobic than they were ten years ago. Which of course is totally different from Geert Wilders' party which has a liberal background and has become more xenophobic.”

According to Professor Heinö, the Sweden Democrats have borrowed strongly from both Geert Wilders and the Danish People’s Party. The party seeks to present itself as part of a broader European front which, motivated by liberal principles, seeks to promote stricter immigration policies.

Since 1998, the Sweden Democrats have doubled their results in each of four consecutive elections. “Both on a local and on a national level, the traditional parties have pursued a policy of ignoring the Sweden Democrats. And it has had the same effect as in the Netherlands and Belgium”, Professor Heinö says. Ignoring right-wing populist parties only makes them grow.

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