Sweden elections: Who are the far-right Sweden Democrats and their leader Jimmie Åkesson?
For a party that only got its first politicians into the Riksdag in 2010, the Sweden Democrats have enjoyed a stratospheric rise up the political charts, to the point where they are poised to become the second largest party in Sunday’s parliamentary election.
It is quite a shift from the fringes of ethno-nationalism to the mainstream of society where it has become acceptable to support a party with its roots in fascism, which regularly preaches an anti-immigrant message.
Yet the party is still haunted by its past.
“Immigration is the reason they exist in the first place,” explained Pontus Odalma Swede who lectures in politics at the University of Edinburgh.
“The anti-immigration message is a given at this point. They want less immigration and more repatriation. But they’ve also shifted the focus to integration failures, and that’s where they tie law and order to immigration.
“The riots that occurred after the burning of the Koran in April it was good news for the Sweden Democrats because they said ‘we said we can’t have different cultures in the same space, it’s the result of uncontrolled immigration'” (sic), Odmalm told Euronews.
“They talk much more about nationalism and the importance of putting Sweden first, and being for Sweden and its citizens. They are inspired by the Trump campaign and adopted a Swedish version of ‘making Sweden great again’, putting the Swedes first. , but without explicitly say who, said Odmalm.
Nazi supporters run for election
This week, just days before the election, Expressen newspaper revealed a list of Sweden Democratic candidates who spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or praised neo-Nazis, some of whom belonged to the radical nationalist Free Sweden – Free Sweden – organization with an estimated 2,000 members.
The leadership of the Sweden Democrats usually say that this type of candidate has kept their views hidden, and are just some bad apples. The party’s supporters, if they care at all, could dismiss the reports as liberal media trying to discredit SD.
In any case, the association between the Sweden Democrats and extremists does not seem to have dissuaded some other political parties, such as the Christian Democrats, from happily agreeing to their ticket for government if a right-wing bloc wins Sunday’s election.
However, the Center Party, traditionally centre-right, has been put off potentially cooperating with the Sweden Democrats because of their more extreme views on immigrants, and has turned to lining up with the Social Democrats’ left bloc instead.
On Friday evening in the closing televised leadership debate, Center leader Annie Lööf urged voters to vote for a party “without xenophobia” and attacked the leader of the Christian Democrats Ebba Busch for having fielded far-right and criminal candidates on their own party’s lists, and also for having aligned themselves electorally with the Sweden Democrats.
“In Ebba Busch’s party, we have just found out that there are neo-Nazis on the lists and organized criminals in MC gangs [motorbike crime gangs]and if you look at her friend Jimmie Åkesson, there are over 200 Nazis on the lists,” Lööf said.
Swedish political expert Dominic Hindefrom the University of Glasgow, has traveled across Sweden ahead of the election and says that even high-ranking representatives from the Sweden Democrats party have been out canvassing for votes and openly criticizing Islam and the perceived threat of Islamization of the Nordic nation, claiming it is responsible for many of Sweden’s social and economic problems.
“It would have been unthinkable for this to happen ten years ago, even to anyone [whose party is] vote 20% to stand openly in a public square, in an election campaign, and get a round of applause from the public,” Hinde said.
“So while the Sweden Democrats may not be as extreme as they have been in the past, when they’ve moderated, they’ve also been able to bring new people on board, and introduce some pretty radical right-wing currents of thought into the mainstream discourse,” he told Euronews.
Who is the party leader of the Sweden Democrats?
Bearded and bespectacled, 43-year-old Jimmie Åkesson is attributed to the man almost alone for bringing the Sweden Democrats into the mainstream of Swedish politics.
Over the past 20 years, he has reinvented and modernized the party in terms of membership and image, and the Sweden Democrats now say they reject fascism and Nazism.
So what kind of leader is Åkesson? It’s hard to know for sure, he said Lucas DahlströmStockholm correspondent for Yle Svenska, the Swedish-language public service news in neighboring Finland.
“Jimmie Åkesson is a very popular leader among the Sweden Democrats and he has really taken the party to a new level. And I don’t think he ever thought they would become this big when he joined the party in the 90s. You have to say that he is a good politician because he has taken the party this far, says Dahlström to Euronews in an interview from a Sweden Democrats stronghold in the south of the country.
“He always says ‘we have never had power, so everything that goes wrong in Sweden is not our fault!’
“It’s very convenient, and that might be why there’s a concern among the Sweden Democrats this year because they’ve always been this anti-establishment party and now they might be in coalition with the government.”
So does Åkesson draw the line clearly enough between the party’s fascist past and its current politics?
– I don’t think that the voters of the Sweden Democrats today care that much about what happened in the past, and you can say that is a problem, says Lucas Dahlström.
“Åkesson draws a line where he says that racism is not allowed in the party and that they will exclude everyone who is racist, but of course, there are elements of that in the party still.
“You can’t wash away your past that easily.”