TheEconomistNovember 28th 2020 431T
wo youngmen, Andreas Palmlov and
Julian Kroon, sit in a bar swapping
anecdotes about their native Sweden. The
welfare system is so lax that an immigrant
drew benefits while serving as the defence
minister of Iraq. A lecturer was suspended
because students complained that a lesson
about fatherhood was heteronormative.
And 1m kroner ($116,000) of taxpayers’ cash
was lavished on art intended not for hu-
man eyes but those of birds and beetles.
Some of the details are disputed. The
Iraqi politician, Najah al-Shammari, a
Swedish citizen, denies committing bene-
fit fraud. But stories like these help explain
why Mr Palmlov and Mr Kroon are mem-
bers of the Sweden Democrats, a
nationalist party. They believe that Sweden
is under threat: from immigrants who
drain the welfare state, from radicals who
undermine traditional values and from an
establishment that stigmatises voices of
common sense like their own.
Storytelling matters in politics. Voters
remember a good yarn more easily than
any statistic. And the Sweden Democrats
tell a simple, emotive one: that non-Euro-
pean immigrants are ruining Sweden, and
a left-wing government is letting them.
In 1988, when it was founded, the party
was dismissed as a rabble of neo-Nazis. But
since the 1990s it has purged overt racists
and cleaned up its image. It gained mo-
mentum in 2015 when Sweden opened its
doors to refugees, letting in over 160,000
(1.6% of the population), mostly from cul-
turally distant places such as Syria and Af-
ghanistan. The government mishandled
the influx, showering the newcomers with
handouts but making it hard for them to
work. (For example, the de facto minimum
wage in shops, hotels and restaurants is
nearly 90% of the average wage in those in-
dustries, pricing newcomers who are still
learning Swedish out of entry-level jobs.)
The open-door policy was quickly re-
versed. But the sight of so many jobless
Muslims lent credibility to the Sweden
Democrats’ message. At an election in 2018,
the party won 17.5% of the vote. To keep itout of power, mainstream parties have had
to form unstable coalitions.
An upsurge in violence between ethnic
gangs (see next article) has given the Swe-
den Democrats another boost. “The major-
ity society is losing control over areas of
Sweden,” says Mattias Karlsson (pictured,
with waistcoat), an mpand the party’s un-
official chief ideologue. He wants to hire
more police, pay them better and swiftly
deport foreign criminals. When an Afghan
commits a crime in Sweden, he says, “hu-
man-rights people say we can’t guarantee
his safety in Afghanistan, so they let him
out on the streets again.”
An increase in recorded sex crimes “is
to a large extent cultural”, says Mr Karlsson,
noting that Sweden took in many refugees
from sexist countries. Reality is more com-
plicated. Sweden expanded its definition
of rape in 2013, and counts it differently
from other countries. If a woman says her
boyfriend assaulted her daily for a year,
Sweden records 365 offences; other coun-
tries might record only one. So the claim,
common on alt-right websites, that immi-
gration has made Sweden the “rape capital
of the world”, is nonsense.
Still, crime rates among refugees really
are higher than among native-born
Swedes, partly because so many are job-
less. Other parties approach the topic gin-
gerly, for fear of sounding racist. The Swe-
den Democrats have no such hang-ups.
“We say what you think,” is their slogan.The Sweden Democrats
On their way in
STOCKHOLM
How long will Sweden’s nationalists be excluded from power?
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