The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats has become the largest party in Sweden according to one opinion poll that underscores the rise of nationalist groups across the traditional Nordic stronghold of social democracy.
The Sweden Democrats received 25.2 per cent in the YouGov poll for August, almost double their score in last September’s parliamentary elections and ahead of the governing Social Democrats on 23.4 per cent and the leading centre-right Moderates on 21 per cent.
The surge in support reflects growing worries over immigration and integration in Sweden, which has taken more asylum seekers in recent years than any other European country relative to the size of its population. It also comes after two people were stabbed to death in an Ikea store in Sweden, with the main suspect being an asylum seeker on the verge of being deported….
YouGov’s methods are questioned by other polling companies as it uses self-recruited internet panels. But other polling companies have also vastly underestimated the strength of anti-immigration parties across Europe, including in Sweden’s elections last year. YouGov’s poll for July already showed the Sweden Democrats on 22.1 per cent, within 1 percentage point of being the largest party.
The FT also notes that, unlike the two ‘outsider’ parties in Finland and Norway (I’ll stick with that generic adjective; there are very substantial differences between the SD, Norway’s Progress Party, and the Finns’ Party) the SD has not been invited into government, nor, I would add, has it, unlike the populist Danish People’s Party, even been ‘admitted’ into the broader political debate. Instead the SD has, as the FT explains, been ostracized by all the other parties, a move that appears to have backfired: The FT reports on findings by political scientists that this isolation, reinforced by a budgetary pact entered into by six of the eight parties in the Swedish parliament last winter (I posted a bit about the latter here) across the political spectrum, has allowed the SD to position itself as the only real opposition, something that Mats Persson, one of the commentators I quoted in that post, suggested could be “the perfect platform for steadily gaining a greater share of the vote”. “Steadily” is so far proving to be an understatement.
The evolving nature of the SD, a party with very unsavory origins indeed, is a discussion to take up again on another occasion, but the party’s success should primarily be seen not as a vote for, but as a vote against, against an ‘official’ consensus on immigration so smug and so stifling that even relatively mild dissent has, until very recently, been close to taboo. That would be a democratic failure under any circumstances, and in current conditions in Sweden…
As I have noted before, the SD’s success is a reminder of the truth of Mark Steyn’s observation that “if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones,” something that the GOP establishment, itself still stuck in ancient immigration orthodoxy, may now be learning the hard way over here.
So what next? This poll may yet prove to be an outlier, but the concerns it represents are not going away. The question is whether any parties other than the SD are prepared to take them seriously. There are some signs that some on the center-right are beginning to retreat from the enthusiasm for mass immigration that cost them the last election, but that this rethink is, even now, only beginning says everything.
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