Swedish democracy works very well providing the voters don’t disagree. But ever since the last general election handed the nationalist Sweden Democrat party the balance of power, Swedish politics have been riven by substantive disagreement.

The Sweden Democrats are a genuinely reactionary party. They want their country, and indeed the world, to be the way it seemed in the 1980s, before globalisation swept much of the social democratic state away, and washed in hundreds of thousands of dark-skinned foreigners. Their social and economic policies are an incoherent mess but their one political demand is clear: a massive and permanent cut in refugee immigration, to levels almost as low as British policy allows under this government. The Sweden Democrats want a cut of 95% in humanitarian immigration. This one policy demand has propelled them over the last 10 years from being an obscure groupuscule with clear neo-Nazi roots to a party with 13% of the seats in parliament, and over 20% in the latest opinion polls.

The response of the other parties has been to ignore them resolutely and with equal firmness hope that they would go away. This alternative to a strategy was severely tested last December when the Sweden Democrats voted to reject the budget proposals of the minority leftwing coalition and then announced they would vote with the government to prevent any centre-right budget proposal. This threatened an emergency election, or complete paralysis. The response was to double down on the policy of ignoring the Sweden Democrats: in order to avoid an election the other seven parties in parliament came to an agreement that they would fix their votes to produce the same outcomes as if no Sweden Democrats had been elected. Since then, the European refugee crisis has developed in its tragic and astonishing magnitude, while Sweden in particular has also attracted large numbers of Roma from inside the EU, some of whom beg for a living. The two inflows have strained the policy of trying to ignore the Sweden Democrats to breaking point.

There are now more than 7,000 applications for political asylum a week in Sweden and the system is almost at bursting point. There have been small riots in Malmö over the demolition of a migrant camp set up for Palestinians and a general sense that the fabric of Swedish society is under strain.

At this point the small, and traditionally leftish Christian Democratic party cracked and at its annual congress repudiated the agreement reached last December. This example was immediately followed by the Conservatives. It seems that this is a ploy to put pressure on the Social Democrats to abandon their minority government and to form a more stable coalition with one or more of the centre-right parties. There is also a perceptible weakening of support for the policy of unrestricted immigration for anyone who can make it across the EU as far as Sweden. The Sweden Democrats, calling this “the greatest catastrophe of the modern age”, have just announced a nationwide campaign for a referendum on immigration. They cannot force one, but they can ensure that tension remains high all winter.

Europe should look at this crisis and learn. It can no longer expect two countries – Sweden and Germany – to do all the hard work of absorbing Syrian refugees.