“Helg … seger!” shouts Rebecka Fallenkvist, raising one arm in a seeming salute to the camera. It is Sunday evening, and the 26-year-old politician from the far-right Sweden Democrats is being interviewed, champagne glass in hand. Her party had just become the second-largest in parliament, gaining more than 20% of the votes.
The Social Democratic prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, has now resigned, conceding defeat to the rightwing bloc. Although its partnering parties have said they wish to keep the cabinet seats to themselves, a far-right party will have considerable influence over government for the first time ever in Swedish history. And these are hardly your “ordinary” anti-immigrant populists. The Sweden Democrats has its roots in the neo-Nazi movement from only 30 years ago. In more recent times, they have proven unable to choose between Putin or Biden.
Fallenkvist called her party’s election success a helgseger, a “weekend victory” – a hitherto unknown concept in the Swedish language. But the way she pronounced her words made them sound uncannily similar to a more well-established phrase: hell seger. That is the Swedish version of Sieg Heil, the Nazi salute. (The party’s press secretary said Fallenkvist was drunk and “it came out wrong”.)
What is going on in Sweden? In this election, 12% of those who voted for the Sweden Democrats voted for the Social Democrats in the previous election, and 14% for the Conservatives. The party received a third of all blue-collar votes. And among Sweden’s young, first-time voters – Greta Thunberg’s peers – the party triumphed, all while proudly announcing that it would do less to fight climate change.
It might be tempting to draw the conclusion that the progressive Pippi Longstockings are dying out in Sweden, while a new generation of aggressive conservatives is taking over. But rather than reflecting any drastic shift in the liberal ethos of Swedes, the election results reveal a more uncomfortable truth: that perhaps Sweden’s supposed liberalism was never that deep to begin with.
Back in the 1980s, the ethnologist Åke Daun argued that the average Swede was extremely conformist and consensus oriented. He found that in neighbouring Scandinavian countries, 4-6% of people disliked the company of those whose ideas and values they did not themselves share. But in Sweden the figure was 45%.
Since then, the main representatives of such “dreaded” difference – immigrants and their descendants – have come to constitute a quarter of the population. But many “native” Swedes do not typically mix with them – and flee their neighbourhoods if they move in. Then there is an unemployment rate among the foreign-born population of almost 20%. Sweden has also seen a surge in shootings and organised crime over the last year. The reasons behind the increase in crime are complex – class and social exclusion play an important role – but the result is a political and media debate that focuses on the supposed values or cultures of immigrants themselves.
During the campaign, policy discussions about crime and migration became one and the same – not only on the right, but also among Social Democrats and Liberals. The Social Democratic minister of integration touted the idea of helping neighbourhoods with high crime rates by introducing ethnic quotas, to keep the number of “non-Nordic” inhabitants under a certain threshold. The Liberal party suggested that two-year olds with foreign-born parents needed to have their Swedish skills tested, and that if their parents refused to send them to a Swedish nursery, social services should be called in.
Andersson, the now former prime minister, said that “we don’t want Chinatowns or Somalitowns” in Sweden. Her vision of Swedishness, as outlined in a pre-election speech, stretches beyond good citizenship. She instead associated Swedish identity with trust and with culturally specific behaviours, such as enjoying solo walks in the woods. Leading Social Democrat intellectual Göran Greider has gone even further, praising the “banal nationalism” of all Swedes eating the same thing on Fridays (tacos), and spending their holidays in the same way (renovating their cottages in said woods).
This Swedish unease with diversity has largely gone under the radar until now, because Swedes are, in fact, open to something else: not pluralism, but change. The Swedes tend to embrace modernity. However, as the political psychologist Karen Stenner has shown, to feel discomfort in the face of change is one thing, but to feel uneasy about difference is quite another. The latter stance is associated with an authoritarian political intolerance.
Fresh data from political scientists Sten Widmalm and Thomas Persson also suggests that 20% of Swedes would be willing to deny freedom of expression to the least-liked group in society. A third would be keen to withdraw the right to demonstrate and to organise politically.
During the pandemic we saw this intolerance put into practice: protecting the consensus around the Swedish strategy often took precedence over protecting vulnerable people. Fighting the virus somehow appeared less important than fighting polarisation. Yet research shows that polarisation remains low in Sweden, despite tenacious rumours to the contrary.
What we are seeing in Sweden might, then, not be a newly awakened belligerence, but the result of a longstanding desire for conformity. For what triggers the authoritarian mindset is exactly the narrative that “we” have somehow lost “our unity”. This popular myth in Sweden, together with a widespread fear of difference, is what was most likely to have contributed to the worrying election results in my country.
Gina Gustavsson is senior lecturer at the department of government at Uppsala University, Sweden
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