Popular concern looks likely to propel Sweden Democrats to a possible 20% of the vote

Last month, yards from the Social Democrats’ booth in Rinkeby town square, where Kersten Aggefors is handing out leaflets for the party that has finished first in every Swedish election since 1917, masked young people set five cars ablaze.

A few days earlier, eight unidentified men had attacked the town’s half-built new police station, crashing through the gate and hurling rocks and firecrackers at security guards, apparently in retaliation for a drug bust. In January, two gunmen walked into a crowded pizzeria and shot a man dead, in what police said was a gang execution.

Rinkeby, a symbol of Scandinavian social democracy when it was built in the 1970s, had a bad reputation, but this was largely undeserved, insisted Aggefors, who has lived in the suburb, 20 minutes by metro from the capital, for 47 years.

“Yes, things need fixing,” she said. “But the residents here are decent people, doing nothing wrong. Maybe I’m stupid, but I’ve always felt safe. It’s just there’s a small criminal minority.”

Tawfiiq, who arrived from Somalia 15 years ago, agreed. “It’s a good place, it’s fine,” he said outside the Islamic centre. “There are some bad people, like everywhere.” Tomas Beer, a local teacher, professed enthusiasm for a “really committed, active, generous community”.

Nevertheless, this suburb of about 16,000 residents, 90% of whom were born abroad or to parents born outside Sweden, and only half of whom are in work, has become shorthand for inequality, social exclusion, crime – and immigration.

Three years after the European migration crisis rocked the country, a headline-hogging series of torched cars, grenade attacks and shootings (129 in Stockholm last year, 19 of them fatal), mostly in socially deprived suburbs such as Rinkeby with high immigrant populations, has kept immigration and integration at the top of the political agenda.



With a week to go before an election on 9 September, in a country that has long prided itself on being perhaps Europe’s most liberal and open to migrants, popular concern over migration looks likely to propel the populist, far-right and anti-immigration Sweden Democrats to a possible 20% of the vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jimmie Åkesson gives a speech in Landskrona. His party could make major gains in the upcoming election. Photograph: TT News Agency/Reuters

“Of course it’s about immigration,” said Paula Bieler, a member of the party’s executive board, speaking at its offices in the Riksdag. . “But immigration affects so much else. Other parties don’t make those connections because it’s ‘not nice’ to do so. That’s basically telling voters they’re stupid.”

Anders Sannerstadt, a specialist in the far-right party at Lund university, agreed that for many Sweden Democrat voters, migration “informs their view of everything – they can relate it to crime, hospital waiting times, schools, pensions.”

Mirroring gains made by far-right parties in Italy, Germany, France, Austria and the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats plainly benefited from the 2015 crisis that overwhelmed social services and caused such fury that refugee accommodation centres were set on fire.

However, Sannerstadt said a nation that once billed itself as a “humanitarian superpower” has long been divided over migration.

“Since the early 1990s, opinion polls have consistently shown more people wanting to reduce numbers than increase them,” he said. “But that was never reflected in official policy.”

About 400,000 people – 163,000 in 2015 – have sought asylum in Sweden in the past six years, the highest number per capita in Europe . The total helped tip the population over the 10 million mark last year.

The economy is doing fine: unemployment is at its lowest for a decade and growth should be about 3% this year. But support for the Sweden Democrats’ policies, which include a total freeze on asylum seekers, accepting future refugees only from Nordic countries, tougher penalties for crime and greater powers for police, has surged.

Niklas Bolin, a specialist in the radical right at Mid Sweden University, said: “Two arguments have been effective. Immigration is a threat to society, because it’s hard to integrate people with different cultural norms. And the cost is harming Sweden’s welfare state. That economic point has really appealed.”

Shunned – with occasional, swiftly retracted exceptions on the right – by Sweden’s other parties because of its roots in the Nazi movement, the party has also linked immigration to violent crime in the minds of many, although official figures show little meaningful correlation.

Headed since 2005 by Jimmie Åkesson, a young, eloquent communicator who has purged most of its more extreme personalities and policies, the Sweden Democrats’ share of the national vote has climbed rapidly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burned-out cars at Frölunda Square in Gothenburg. Police suspect gangs of young people were involved in the coordinated riots. Photograph: Adam Ihse/EPA

Support doubled from 5.7% in 2010, when the Sweden Democrats made their parliamentary debut, to 12.9% in 2014, and has climbed sharply again since, to a level that could see it finish anywhere from first to third, with 70-plus MPs.

Both the centre-left and centre-right parties, the ruling Social Democrats and opposition Moderate party, have swung right in response. The outgoing red-green coalition radically tightened immigration rules , cutting the number of arrivals to 26,000 last year. Stefan Löfven, the prime minister, has said the number should halve.

The Social Democrats want harsher penalties for gun crimes and sexual assault, an end to financial support for undocumented foreigners and faster repatriation of failed asylum applicants. The Moderates have promised cuts to refugee welfare.

But for a critical few years, said Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a far-right specialist at Södertörn University, the Sweden Democrats had “basically an open field” as the only party critical of immigration. “And now the mainstream parties can’t get back the voters they’ve lost,” Jungar said.

On course for a record low score of about 25%, the Social Democrats have admitted mistakes were made. “Obviously there were underestimated integration problems before 2015,” said Anders Ygeman, a former home affairs minister who now heads the party’s parliamentary group. “Maybe people didn’t want to discuss migration so as not to help the far right.”

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The party now needs strong policies on immigration and crime, Ygeman said, “perhaps not to win voters back, but to stop more leaving”. Whether it will be able to do that is far from certain.

Governments in Sweden do not need a majority to continue governing – they must just avoid facing one. But with parliament’s dominant centre-left and centre-right blocs both heading for about 40% of the vote, whatever government emerges will have to turn on some occasions to either the opposition or the populists to have a chance of passing legislation.

A raft of multi-party coalitions look possible on left and right. The Social Democrats or the Moderates could also form single-party minority governments. Although considered unlikely, Sweden may even see a German-style grand coalition linking the two traditional blocs.

But in most scenarios, some proposed laws will stand or fall on the vote of the Sweden Democrats, forcing the government to at least consider their views. No formal arrangements are yet likely, said Bolin, but “in the long run, bit by bit, it will be impossible not to include them somehow”.

Bieler wholeheartedly agreed. “One in five, perhaps one in four voters will cast their ballot for us,” she said. “Today in Sweden, everyone knows someone, maybe loves someone, who supports the Sweden Democrats … We cannot be excluded for ever.”