Politicians in Sweden are negotiating to form a government following a surge in support for the far right in Sunday’s inconclusive elections.
The Prime Minister has ruled out a doing a deal with them, saying he’ll pursue negotiations with the Greens instead.
But it is the rise of a party that calls for tight immigration restrictions and advocates paying immigrants to go home that has got the most attention.
Crucial to the Sweden Democrats’ success was that they crossed the 4 per cent threshold necessary for parliamentary representation. They got 5.7 per cent and, with that, 20 of 379 seats – in a hung parliament they can now claim to hold the balance of power.
The party’s most potent message: that immigration has gone too far, multiculturalism does not work. They campaigned hard on what they claimed was the failure of Muslims to integrate into Swedish society.
One television commercial for the party asked what – in tight economic times – should be cut: pensions or immigration.
Its depiction of a little old white lady on a Zimmer frame competing for state resources with marauding, burqa-clad Muslim women got the advert banned.
In an interview with Channel 4 News, Kent Ekeroth, the international secretary of the Sweden Democrats, denied that the party was racist.
“We think that anyone can become Swedish if they adapt to the Swedish society, values and norms,” he said. “It is nothing to do with colour or anything like that.
“We want to step aside from integration, where people meet half-way and want to go to assimilation…We don’t want our Swedish society to adapt to Muslim demands.”
Although the number of Muslims in Sweden is relatively low, it’s growing. Sweden took in more Iraqi asylum seekers than any other European country following the war.
And there have been clashes – in Malmo in March 2009, for example, as pro-Palestinians protested against a tennis match with Israel.
Yesterday, though, in the wake of the success of the Sweden Democrats, the protests were against them. Many Swedes pride themselves on living in a tolerant and high welfare-society and are shocked at what they see as a rejection of that.
Far right parties – and policies – are having a revival across Europe.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party is the country’s third biggest. A far right party is part of the governing coalition in Italy. And in France, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has banned the burqa in public places. Many see his crackdown on Roma gypsies as a way to appeal to the supporters of the National Front.