By the time anti-immigration firebrand Jimmie Åkesson arrived for a rally in Malmö on the eve of this month’s elections, his party, the Sweden Democrats, had been striking fear into the hearts of international newspaper readers for a year. To anyone standing in the main square, it was hard to see why. Malmö, with 300,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city and, thanks to a 20-year-old bridge that crosses the sound to Copenhagen, its most international. After decades of unbroken mass migration, culminating in a record intake of refugees from the Muslim world in 2015, it is also the least ethnically Swedish. In Scania, as that part of southern Sweden is called, the transformation has gone poorly, bringing more welfare payments and lots more crime. The Sweden Democrats are the number-one party in most districts there. Yet the thousand or so people who showed up to hear Åkesson did not look hopping mad. They looked like a relatively civil lunch-hour crowd in any multicultural American metropolis.

That soon changed. As Åkesson, a bespectacled 39-year-old with a pleasing baritone, began to speak, small groups of people amid the crowd raised rainbow flags, banners with “Refugees Welcome” on them, and signs hand-scrawled with obscenities. Police patiently steered them to the back of the crowd, the area designated for protesters. This went on for the 45 minutes Åkesson held the stage. As it did, the front of the crowd got older, quieter, and more ethnically Swedish and those in the back got younger, browner, more numerous, and more voluble—a recapitulation of Scandinavia’s recent history. By the time Åkesson was done talking, the square was pulsating, full of loud chants (“Refugees have no choice!” “No racists on our streets!”) and pumped fists, and it was not the Sweden Democrats who were doing the chanting and pumping.