The party from the neo-Nazi fringe once railed against ‘the foreign threat’. Now, just weeks from polling day, the Sweden Democrats think they can win their support

At the Malmedalen political festival in Rosengård, the Sweden Democrats tent was far and away the busiest. Inside, Jörgen Grubb was taking his message of restrictive immigration, draconian law and order, and Swedish cultural nationalism to a part of Malmö where close to 90% of people have a foreign background. And it was going surprisingly well.

When a woman in a hijab raised Grubb’s party’s plans to ban full face veils, he clarified quickly that “what you have on you there, that’s absolutely OK”.

“It’s this,” said Grubb, waving two fingers in front of his eyes to indicate the face-veil, or niqab. “I think it’s uncomfortable for people.” The woman nodded in agreement. “You do have to adapt to western society,” she said. “And you can’t work as a nursery school teacher if the children can’t see your face.”

Grubb, the fast-talking Malmö chair of the surging populist Sweden Democrats party, drew crowds of local youths looking to test their wits against him and his colleague, Iranian-born councillor Nima Gholam Ali Pour. But the tent also attracted those who were genuinely curious about the party before next month’s election, at which the far-right force is expected to record its strongest performance to date.

A party whose first leader came from the neo-Nazi Nordic Realm party, whose co-founders included a veteran of the Waffen SS and which, as recently as 2006, was a fringe far-right group sharing its torch logo with the UK’s National Front, has, in little more than a decade, brought itself to the verge of becoming Sweden’s biggest party.

Mattias Karlsson, the party’s parliamentary head and chief ideologue, says that immigrants are one of two groups his party is working hardest to attract. “Our two main target groups are immigrants and women,” he told the Observer. “We feel we still have a great potential to grow in those groups.”

The most recent opinion survey from the government agency Statistics Sweden suggests that the strategy could be paying off: astonishing for a party whose leader, Jimmie Åkesson, once described the growing number of Muslims in Sweden as “our greatest foreign threat since the second world war”.

In May 2014, in the run-up to the last general election, the Sweden Democrats had the support of 2% of foreign-born citizens. In May this year, it was 12%. “A lot of the crime is happening in the suburbs where a lot of foreign-born people live,” Karlsson said. “It’s their cars that are being burned. It’s their kids’ schools that are descending into chaos.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jörgen Grubb, chairman of the Sweden Democrats in Malmö. Photograph: Richard Orange

This portrayal is deemed excessively negative by many Swedes, including those who live in Rosengård, where smiling families and well maintained parks and playgrounds tell a very different story.

But the party’s message is hitting home and, almost whatever happens in the remaining two weeks of the campaign, the Sweden Democrats will be seen as the winner.

A recent poll by the Sifo research company had the party leapfrogging the centre-right Moderates to become Sweden’s second-biggest party with 19.5% of the vote. Even if the figure falls several points short of this, the party’s seats will make it near impossible to form a government in Sweden without at least its passive support, or some sort of deal between the centre-left and centre-right parties. And it could do better still. A YouGov poll in June had the party ahead of the Social Democrats as well, on 25.7%.

Much of this is due to the leader, Åkesson, who, with his neatly parted hair and preppy uniform of jacket and chinos, has perfected the art of framing his message in a wry, reasoning tone that appeals to Swedes.

But it is also because of Karlsson’s doctrine of cultural nationalism, according to which foreigners who learn Sweden’s language and accept its culture are welcome, and to the party’s “zero-tolerance” policy against members who make openly racist or antisemitic statements.

Sweden’s far right has flourished because the elite lost touch with the people Read more

When, last week, a municipal election candidate was found to have posted a white nationalist song online with the refrain “Swedes are white and our country is ours”, Karlsson told the press that the candidate would probably be expelled. The Hungarian-born Sweden Democrat MP Anna Hagwall was sacked two years ago for a perceived antisemitic attack against the Bonnier family, newspaper owners with a Jewish background.

“We are really firm and non-compromising about these issues,” Karlsson said. “Any sign of xenophobia and racism, we immediately expel those representatives.”

But Jonathan Leman, a researcher at the anti-extremism magazine Expo, warns that the party’s disavowal of xenophobia does not go too deep. The party is campaigning on policies that include a ban on the niqab, restriction of political asylum to Danes, Finns and Norwegians, and no work permits for all but the most essential foreign workers. “That’s the official line,” he said. “However the people who are active in the Sweden Democrats have a mindset where immigrants and minorities are at the centre of everything that’s wrong in society. That’s why we keep on seeing these scandals in the news about SD politicians saying things like ‘Sweden is a place where whites belong and non-whites don’t.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lars Adaktusson from the Swedish Christian Democrats gives a speech during the launch of the Malmedalen political festival in Malmö. Photograph: Johan Nilsson/TT NEWS AGENCY

At the party’s election tent in the university town of Lund, it is hard to see any remnants of the party’s far-right past. A silver crucifix over her floral blouse, Julia Kronlid, the party’s national vice chair, said that she had worked hard to appeal to female voters, raising issues such as the rising incidence of rape, “honour” culture, low pay for nurses, and foreign aid. “We actually want to raise the amount that we send abroad in overseas aid so that people can see that we are not evil people who don’t care about people in a difficult situation,” she said.

Again, it is having an impact. According to Statistics Sweden, the party has doubled its support among women from 5% at the last election to nearly 10% in May.

Kronlid claimed that she had never felt it difficult to be a woman in the party, a sentiment echoed by Bo Broman, the party’s first openly gay parliamentary candidate. “I’ve never heard anything homophobic in the party,” said Broman, who has been working as its finance chief.

But, as much as the party has succeeded in partially detoxifying its image, the mask sometimes slips. Back at the Malmedalen festival, Grubb was taunted by a local man about whether he counted as “Swedish” under the party’s ideology of cultural nationalism, even if he did not unconditionally love or respect the country.

“Listen,” Grubb said. “You can define yourself. First you must respect the country and its values and work to do your best in society. Then, if you are a Swedish citizen, you can be Swedish. Full stop.”

As the young man’s friends massed around Grubb, jeering, he snapped: “It’s not Swedish culture to crowd someone in like this. In Sweden we are calmer. That is not Swedish culture.”