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Swedish Politics in Chaos

by Fjordman

Sweden will hold a new election on March 22, 2015, just a few months after the previous general elections. The move was announced by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven on December 3, 2014 after his government’s budget failed a crucial vote in Parliament. This is highly unusual for Sweden.

The trade unionist Löfven is leader of the Social Democratic Party. His cabinet, widely considered one of the weakest in recent Swedish history, is a minority coalition cabinet consisting of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. It was installed on October 3, 2014. Mehmet Kaplan, Sweden’s Minister of Housing and Urban Development from the Green Party, was born in Turkey. He has been accused of having ties to Islamic groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Stockholm and the country’s second city, Gothenburg, have been plagued by a rise in violent crime. A justice center in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, was bombed in late 2014. It was the second attack on the building this year. The center houses multiple departments, including a courthouse, police offices, the region’s prosecution authority and the economic crime authority. Malmö has been hit by a string of shootings and bombings in 2014, including several car bomb attacks. This is not Colombia or Iraq — this is Sweden, today.

In December 2014 the intelligence community expressed concerns about a rapid rise in the number of Swedish citizens heading for Iraq and Syria to fight for the Islamic State (ISIS). Anders Thornberg, the head of Sweden’s Security Service Säpo, told Swedish television that “It’s an explosive development. When I talk to my colleagues on the other security services in Europe and around the world we see the same trend.” He suggested that by late 2014, up to 300 Muslims from Sweden had travelled to countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria to fight Jihad. Some of these Jihadists return to Europe afterwards, battle-hardened.

In this situation, virtually the first thing the left-wing Löfven government did was to officially recognize a state of Palestine. Apparently, it is acceptable for Palestinian Muslims to have their own nation-state, but not for Swedes or other Europeans.

The Sweden Democrats entered Parliament for the first time in 2010. In 2014, they became the third largest party there. They decided to use their new found strength to vote against the proposed budget. “Sweden has the most extreme immigration policy in Europe and the government wanted to make it more extreme,” said its acting leader Mattias Karlsson. The country has the highest rate of asylum applications per capita of any EU country. The SD indicate that they are ready to bring down any government that does not meet its demand of addressing what it sees as “unregulated immigration.”

Mona Sahlin has been a profiled member of the Swedish Social Democrats for decades. She was the party’s candidate for Prime Minister in 2010. In December 2014 Sahlin warned, concerning the Sweden Democrats, that “[a] xenophobic and right-wing populist party has today taken Parliament hostage. Democracy is at stake.” So, if the country’s third largest political party vote in a way she disagrees with, this is a threat to democracy.

The Social Democrat Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson called the Sweden Democrats a “neo-Fascist party” that “doesn’t stand for the basic value that all human beings are equal, which now raises its voice and wants to dictate the terms in Swedish politics.” Even the Prime Minister called SD a “neo-Fascist party.”

The Guardian in Britain, a left-wing newspaper, states that “The Sweden Democrats are treated as pariahs by the mainstream parties and the media.” This despite the fact that they more than doubled their vote in the September 2014 elections to almost 13%.

What about the so-called conservatives? Sadly, when it comes to immigration, they are not much better than the Social Democrats. Mass immigration continued at full speed under the center-right government of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt between 2006 to 2014. The same was the case from 1991 to 1994 under PM Carl Bildt. The four center-right parties in Sweden don’t call themselves conservatives, anyway. They simply call themselves “The Alliance.”

The traditional left-right axis cannot explain this situation. The political terms Left and Right date back to seating arrangements in the Assemblée nationale during the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. They may have outgrown their usefulness in the twenty-first century; perhaps we need a new vocabulary. The dividing line now is not between left-wing and right-wing; it is between those who value nations and those who don’t.

All of the other parties in the Swedish Parliament (the sjuklövern*), including the so-called conservatives, champion continued mass immigration. All of the other parties gang up on the one party in Parliament that objects to continued mass immigration at current levels. By doing so, they demonstrate to the nation that the Sweden Democrats represent the only genuine opposition. As long as the latter stand firm, they will continue to grow. They have a pool of potential supporters much larger than their current number of voters. The Sweden Democrats have finally forced the issue of immigration higher on the political agenda in Sweden.

Some Swedes feel that the current situation is embarrassing for Sweden’s image abroad as a stable and well-governed country. It makes Sweden resemble a banana republic. My view is that this old image was already an illusion, a false façade desperately maintained to keep up appearances. Sweden is no longer a well-governed country. Attacks not just with knives or bottles, but with car bombs and hand grenades, have become regular occurrences in the worst-hit areas. Foreign tribes foolishly imported in large numbers clash with each other in Swedish streets.

The chaos of Swedish politics now accurately mirrors the chaos of Swedish streets. No more pretending.

The nation of Sweden can only be saved by abandoning Sweden as the humanitarian ideological beacon for mankind. There is not much time left.

Note:

* Sjuklövern: seven-leaf clover, the seven-party system. All parties in Parliament, apart from the Sweden Democrats, are seen as one party when it comes to policies on mass immigration. These seven parties are the “seven sisters” or the “7-clovers”.

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Hat tip for the government photo: Da Capo.