The news from Stockholm isn’t quite as grim as some had feared—but it’s pretty serious. With around 85 percent of the ballots counted in Sunday’s general election, the far-right immigration-restrictionist Sweden Democrats took 17.6 percent of the vote, making it the third largest party in the Swedish Rikstag.
That’s bigger news than it may appear. For more than a century, the center-left Social Democrats have dominated Swedish politics, typically taking a third to nearly a half of the electorate. Its hegemony began to falter in the early 2000s, as Swedes began to worry that the country’s generous welfare state was being taken advantage of by immigrants, especially those from the Middle East and North Africa. The main beneficiaries of this shift were the Sweden Democrats, a socially conservative and anti-immigration party. The SD was founded by neo-fascists in the 1980s but has labored (not entirely successfully) to rid itself of racist elements. The party poses no challenge to Sweden’s welfare state but objects to its membership in the European Union and rejects the aggressive multiculturalism of Europe’s transnational elite.
The SD first entered parliament in 2010, when it crossed the required 4 percent threshold and won 10 seats (out of 349). By 2014 it took 13 percent of the vote and secured 49 seats. With Sunday’s victories it will have 63 seats. That’s far fewer than the governing center-left coalition’s 144 seats and the center-right Alliance’s 142 seats. But the Sweden Democrats will have newfound influence over policymaking in Stockholm—especially on matters of immigration and E.U. membership.
The rise of Sweden’s populist right is directly attributable to the country’s liberal immigration policy. The most visible manifestation of that policy was the country’s acceptance of 163,000 refugees during the Syrian civil war in 2014 and 2015. For a country of just 10 million people, that was a spur for ordinary Swedes to think about what large-scale immigration would mean for their country’s racially homogenous and culturally consolidated nation-state.
We don’t presume to know the right answer for Swedes, but one point stands out for Americans: Progressives in this country are fond of pointing to Scandinavian countries as a model for the United States: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland boast lavish welfare states funded by thriving market economies. That model makes recessions particularly painful (recall Sweden’s near collapse in the 1990s), but it can work as long as the market isn’t overregulated.
What the Scandinavian model can’t handle is immigration. Not only do large numbers of immigrants strain the healthcare and welfare systems; they also generate social anxieties that can’t be quelled by lectures from politicians and cultural poohbahs. European Union leaders may protest all they like that immigration levels are still relatively low and that immigrants aren’t threatening economic growth. That may be true. Sweden’s economy is currently robust. But ordinary Swedes aren’t wrong to worry that what’s happening in France may happen in Sweden: intermittent terrorist atrocities, endless disputes over the status of Muslims, and so on. If traditional center-right and center-left parties can’t speak plainly to these concerns, voters will find parties that will.
The lesson for American policymakers is plain. We can have a generous welfare state, and we can have an open-door immigration policy, but we can’t have both without more and bigger populist reactions.
