Europe’s focus turned nervously to Sweden on Sunday, after an explosive election in Germany just a week earlier placed a far-right party, officially classed as “extremist”, on the brink of power in a German state for the first time since the Nazi era. A party with neo-Nazi roots has been pulling the government’s strings in Sweden for the last four years – would the country’s general election put the far right formally in government? Or would enough Swedes opt for a gear change, having seen the Sweden Democrats’ hardline (some would say poisonous) agenda in action?
Votes were still being counted on Wednesday but it was immediately clear that the far-right Sweden Democrats had suffered a setback; their first loss of support among voters since it entered parliament for the first time 16 years ago. The party slipped from being the country’s second biggest party to its third. The centre-left Social Democrats appear poised for a return to power, although it could take months for their leader, Magdalena Andersson, to form a coalition.
Strong results for the left and green parties gave her left bloc a wafer-thin, three-seat majority. Is the far right’s regression, however modest, a turning point? Have Swedes reached the limits of a taboo-busting experiment with populist, nationalist rightwing prescriptions?
And is there a message for mainstream leaders across Europe, many of whom seem fatalistic about a continental far-right surge? France goes to the polls in April while governments in Italy, Spain and Poland, all face their electorates later next year. The Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde says elections in one country are a poor guide to what will happen in another.
Specific local factors in Sweden, including a scandal, may have dented the far right’s support. For Mudde, the scale of the AfD’s win in Saxony Anhalt, however, was “a black day for Europe” – and with far-right ideas gaining ground across the continent, he warned mainstream politicians that “today’s key fight is for democracy, rather than for party or power”. This is where Sweden offers a cautionary tale.
Its political establishment had “fully normalised” the far-right party, Mudde said. Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a professor of political science at Södertörn University in Stockholm, is very sure that the Sweden Democrats are not on the way out. Electoral rankings go up and down, she said, and the party’s influence will endure.
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