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.