The leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, 43-year-old Jimmie Åkesson, joined the party in 1990s, helping to form a youth group in his home town of Sölvesborg.
In 2002, he became the leader of Sweden Democrats’ national youth organisation, then took over the SD party leadership in 2005, when voter support was steadily about 1%.
Åkesson was raised in a middle-class family with an entrepreneur father and a mother who worked as a nursing assistant in Sölvesborg, a town of 9,000 people in southern Sweden. It was there, in rural Scania’s small towns and farmsteads, that SD built its stronghold, amid concerns about the heavily immigrant-populated city of Malmö nearby.
After leaving school, Åkesson studied political science in Lund, where he linked up with what came to be known as the “Gang of Four” with future party leaders Richard Jomshof, Mattias Karlsson and Björn Söder, who went on to build the party’s electoral base around the message that Sweden’s peaceful welfare state had been destroyed by Muslim immigration.
The party underwent a major makeover under Åkesson’s leadership, replacing its blue-and-yellow torch logo with an anemone, and vowing to rid itself of its racist and violent roots.
The party won 5.7% of votes when it entered parliament in 2010, 12.9% in 2014, when it became Sweden’s third-biggest party in parliament, and 17.5% in 2018. Its rise has come alongside heavy immigration in Sweden. The country of 10.3 million people has welcomed about half a million asylum seekers in the past decade.
The party continued to be dogged by accusations of harbouring violent racists and swastika-wearing Nazi sympathisers. In October 2012, Åkesson introduced “zero tolerance against racism and extremism” in the party.
In 2015, he excluded the entire Sweden Democrat youth organisation because of its links with extremists. Critics say, however, that only low-level party members have since been purged, while those higher up the party hierarchy have escaped censure.
References to the importance of “inherited essence”, which smacked of 1930s race biology, were scrapped from the party’s programme only in 2019.
In a debate article in 2009, Åkesson claimed that Muslim immigration to Sweden was “our biggest foreign threat since the second world war”.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
