How Europe’s most welcoming country turned on migrants ...Middle East

On Sunday, as nationalist movements gain popularity across Europe, Swedes will vote on whether their country, too, will continue its rightward shift, paving the way for a party with neo-Nazi roots to take power. 

The Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, of the conservative Moderate Party, leads a three-party, centre-right coalition that already includes the far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (SD). Going up against him is former prime minister Magdalena Andersson of the centre-left Social Democrats (SAP).

But this time, if the right wins, Kristersson has promised the SD – currently the second-largest party in the Riksdag – cabinet posts. That would bring the far right into government for the first time.

Polls show the centre-left opposition enjoying a narrow lead, but that lead is narrowing.

“It’s going to be a really messy situation here,” Sten Widmalm, professor of political science at Uppsala University, told The i Paper. “There are great uncertainties.” 

Sweden once prided itself on its egalitarian policies, with its generous welfare system, free healthcare and high-quality education, grounded in its concept of folkhemmet (the “people’s home”) and social democracy, that made it the envy of Europe.

But this welcoming climate has changed in recent years.

“What worries me mostly is that I feel that we have a society that has hardened; it starts with suspicion rather than coming from a place of trust, which is something that is very cherished in us,” said Camila Salazar Atías, who is standing as a parliamentary candidate for the Social Democrats in Sunday’s election.

Sweden’s generous asylum policies have traditionally made it one of the continent’s most welcoming countries for refugees. Over the past century, Sweden had generously taken in several waves of immigration and refugees. During the Second World War, it sheltered thousands of Danish Jews, saving almost the entire community from the Nazis. Later, in the 1970s, it hosted Chileans escaping the junta of General Pinochet, as well as hundreds of thousands of Finnish migrant workers. In the 1980s came the Kurds, Somalis and Iranians, and in the 1990s, refugees fleeing the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Many feared the Bosnians’ arrival would bring the war with them, but for the most part they successfully integrated into Swedish society and were even appointed to ministerial roles. In the mid-2000s, Sweden accepted nearly half of all Iraqi refugees in the EU.

During the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, Sweden received 163,000 asylum seekers – 12 per cent of all those who sought protection in the EU, second only after Germany, but first as a percentage of population.

By then, social rifts were becoming apparent. For example, the second-largest contingent of ISIS recruits in Europe, after Belgium, came from Sweden. And around the same time as Europe opened its doors in 2015, a crime wave was beginning to engulf the Scandinavian society.

“The most important thing [for the rightward shift] was the increase in violence. The shootings, the bomb attacks, the infiltrations of the public sector by criminal gangs,” explained Professor Widmalm.

“This was going on from 2015 when Sweden was the highest receiver of immigrants in all of Europe… And the [ruling] Social Democrats were unable to do something about it.”

The reason for the shootings and bombings rocking Swedish cities was score-settling over the lucrative drug trade, controlled by the likes of the notorious Foxtrot gang. The danger was most keenly felt in low-income neighborhoods populated by immigrants from the Balkans, Middle East and Somalia, where de-facto segregation produced a generation of disaffected young men. These areas were sometimes labelled “no-go zones,” although they were not beyond the reach of the law.

“A lot of people will say the reason we have so many problems and crime has gone up is because of the big migration wave that we had in 2015; we were too naïve and helped too many and now we have to have a strict migration,” Camila Salazar Atías, who works as a criminologist at the youth organisation Fryshuset, told The i Paper.

“But at the same time, a lot of the kids that came when they were youngsters, most of them went through college and they’re now working in different parts of society and are doing really well; I would say better than a lot of the second-generation kids. So I would say that the biggest impact was that the whole system was overloaded because of the migration wave and failed to take care of the needs of citizens that were here already in trying to help the ones that came.”

Negative stereotypes about immigration and crime have existed for quite some time. In the 1970s, when the murder rate was actually higher than today, it was the Finns, with their reputation for drunken brawls, who were seen as the troublemakers overrepresented in crime statistics.

However, certain aspects of the crime wave were grimly new: notably, the use of firearms, along with hand grenades and other explosives, that were smuggled from the former war zones in the Balkans. By the start of the decade, Sweden had the worst level of gun deaths in Europe: two and a half times the European average, with most victims being men aged 20-29. The killers, meanwhile, kept getting younger: teenage hitmen were recruited over social media on the basis that they’d suffer softer penalties if they were caught.

Since 2016, immigration rules were gradually tightened, and in 2022 Kristersson’s conservative Moderate party was voted into office, a historic realignment that broke the ruling centre-left Social Democrats’ decades-long hold on power. Kristersson won the election by blaming the SAP for a tidal wave of crime and entered a coalition with the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), which has roots in the fringe neo-Nazi movement.

“The party was formed in 1987 as an amalgamation between anti-immigration groups, and the skinheads, as well as guys from the old Swedish national-socialist and fascist movements,” Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a researcher into the radical right at Södertörn University in Stockholm told The i Paper.

“But they have transformed a lot – they wouldn’t be here if they would have maintained their more extremist roots.”

The SD’s hardline views on immigration and crime dominating the public discourse.

“When it comes to immigration, they took the lead in saying that Sweden had to decrease immigration, which is often the case with what we call right-wing populists,” explained Widmalm.

“But if you say that that’s a populist sign then almost all Swedish parties have become right-wing populists because after the 2015 situation, almost all parties agreed that immigration must be curbed.”

The coalition imposed sweeping new measures including expanded police and surveillance powers, lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 14 and allowing witnesses to testify anonymously in certain cases.

Sceptics warned the measures erode civil rights and due process, but they seem to have been effective: last year, Sweden’s homicide rate continued its downward trajectory to reach its lowest point in a decade, and on Wednesday, Gothenburg celebrated an entire year without fatal shootings.

“The narrative about migration and crime has been so interconnected so every time we talk about crime, we say we’re going to lower migration because that would be the solution to crime,” said Salazar Atias.

The coalition slashed refugee quotas from 5,000 to 900 annually, residency permits can now be revoked for vaguely defined “bad behaviour,” while new rules bar most asylum seekers from residency in the first place.

Muslims in particular have been singled out, with SD representatives warning of Islamisation and calling for enforced remigration and demolishing mosques.

“For the Swedish Democrats, they were antisemitic in the beginning, but now they have replaced antisemitism with anti-Islam, and they see Islam as particularly problematic to integrate into the Nordic and Swedish traditions and values,” said Jungar.

It’s unclear if crime crackdowns and stricter immigration will ensure election victory on Sunday, overshadowed by other issues such as healthcare and welfare. But immigration is still a concern.

“The Sweden Democrats… have created a division in society, where there’s the sensation that the Swedes, we are different [to] the ones who have emigrated or are in exile here,” said Salazar Atias.

“It’s counterproductive because if you’re always on the verge of the rules changing and maybe you will be thrown out, the willingness to stay and be part of something [diminishes].”

Even if the centre-left opposition get ahead, however, Professor Widmalm observed that they may have a dilemma of their own: whether or not to govern with the Left Party, which has recently stirred controversy over some of it’s members’ sympathetic letters to imprisoned Hamas members, while antisemitism has surged since the outbreak of the Gaza war.

“The Left Party has turned into what people feared the Sweden Democrats would be,” he said.

“And when the Left Party is not let into the government, or if the Social Democrats are not following the advice of the Left Party, the Left Party has had a habit before of bringing down Social Democratic governments. Voting against them, in effect, together with the opposition.”

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