A Swedish Shake-Up Sunday’s vote could be the next in Europe to boost the far right.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-swedish-shake-up-1536191274
Now it may be Sweden’s turn. Voters head to the polls for a national election on Sunday, and as in nearly every other recent European election the polls suggest that Swedes are set to rebel against mainstream parties, especially on immigration.
As usual in Swedish elections, the top vote-getter is expected to be the center-left Social Democrats of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. But polls currently peg the party’s support at about 25%, down from the roughly 30% in recent elections. The bigger race is for second place, between the mainstream center-right Moderate party and the heretofore fringe Sweden Democrats. Both currently enjoy between 15% and 20% support in the polls.
This means the Sweden Democrats are peeling voters away from both mainstream parties and are on track for their best-ever result. Sweden’s complicated parliamentary-seat math may still allow the Moderates to form a ruling coalition, but it would be a weak government, and the fringe party could play spoiler on specific legislation.
In a now familiar European story, the top three issues have been migration, migration and migration. Sweden welcomed more than its fair share of Middle Eastern migrants in 2015, with a ratio of migrants to locals even greater than in Germany. But voters quickly had second thoughts, and in late 2015 Mr. Löfven’s government tried to shut the door by imposing new border checks to block migrant entries.
Many Swedes seem to think that change came too late. A spate of murders, rapes, arsons and other crimes have been blamed on recent immigrants and gangs that count them as members. The influx also has further burdened Sweden’s welfare state, as government health-care and housing administrators struggle to cope with the new arrivals.
Debates about migration aren’t new in Sweden, and an inflow of Bosnians in the 1990s also caused controversy. That may be why voters now distrust mainstream parties that have argued about migration for decades without effectively addressing it. The Sweden Democrats have capitalized with a get-tough message. They propose an effective ban on new asylum-seekers, faster deportation of illegal migrants, and tightening rules on Swedish citizenship including a language test.
That’s not so different from what the center-right Moderates propose on migration, which includes a greater emphasis on deporting asylum claimants whose applications are rejected and a shift to temporary residence permits for asylum seekers that could require them to leave eventually. Mr. Löfven pledges to cut the number of new admissions and curtail welfare benefits for migrants. Voters don’t seem to believe most of those promises.
The question after Sunday’s election will be what to do about the Sweden Democrats in parliament. Mainstream parties are inclined to shun the SD, which has its origins in a neo-Nazi movement. Leader Jimmie Akesson and the top ranks of the SD have tried to purge the party of that extremist element, but that fringe is probably still overrepresented in the party’s rank-and-file.
Yet clearly the SD speaks for a growing number of Swedes who aren’t extremists but are frustrated with mainstream parties that have lost credibility. Europe can’t shun those voters forever, and Sweden’s two main parties may be the latest to pay the price for having failed to respond to their electorate.
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