Sweden’s immigrants are turning their backs on the country’s mainstream political parties
STOCKHOLM
In Malmö, one of the most diverse cities in Sweden, there was a long line of people waiting to vote in the polling station in the Rosengard district.
The Social Democrats have mostly governed the city since 1919, and according to this year’s election tally, they have stuck with it, keeping all 20 seats they won on the city council as early as 2018.
The big surprise in Malmö, however, was the success of the new party Nyans, which will become the second largest party after the Social Democrats in several immigrant electoral districts.
The party received 30.9% of the vote in Rosengard, just behind the Social Democrats with 38.3%.
Sead Busuladzic, Nyan’s board member and the party’s leader for Sweden’s southernmost Scania county, said factors such as the burning of the Koran and problems with Swedish social services taking children from their parents contributed to people voting for them.
However, he said that racism in society was also a determining factor for voters with an immigrant background, because “they don’t feel that they belong in the country, they don’t feel that the parties represent them, so they don’t feel that they are involved in politics, he said.
According to Busuladzic, the Nyans party has tried to involve people with different backgrounds “so that they feel that Sweden is also their home and they feel that they should be involved in how the country is governed, and so that they don’t feel like they are some kind of second-class citizen. “
Masoud Kamali, one of the world’s leading sociologists, who currently lives and works in Sweden, believes that the established parties failed to attract voters with an immigrant background because they failed to address “the issues related to these marginalized areas.”
Since the far-right Sweden Democrats, the “racist party,” entered the Swedish parliament, “all elections have been heavily influenced by the far-right slogans, right-wing programs and anti-immigrant programs,” he said.
Kamali believes that even the ruling Social Democrats adapted to this racist discourse in last and this year’s elections.
He said many scholars warned the government that this kind of rhetoric would make people with immigrant backgrounds or people in marginalized areas refuse to participate in elections and seek alternative options.
“I know that for example in Rosengard, in Malmö, Nyans got about 46% of the vote, which shows that people in marginalized areas are very disappointed with the mainstream parties,” Kamali added.
In the last two elections, the Social Democrats “failed” to address issues affecting immigrants and “they even present these areas as a problem for the country when they talk about hiring more police, attacking radicals and attacking radicalization of people, so they have nothing to give,” he said.
Kamali pointed out that people living in marginalized areas have turned their backs on the Social Democrats and have voted for Nyan’s party and other parties because even “Sweden’s Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson just openly said in the media that she doesn’t do it. want ‘somalitowns’ in the country, and this is just very racist.”
– This is something that the racist party Sweden Democrats and many other right-wing parties say.
Does not participate in the election
In Sweden’s poorest districts Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm, turnout tends to be low.
While doing research, Kamali spoke to many people in these areas and was told that “every four years, political parties come to us and want our votes, but when the elections are over, they won’t do anything to improve the situation in the labor market, in the education system and everywhere.”
Kamali, who is also a writer and sociologist at Mittuniversitetet, concluded that people were interested in political parties as voters, but not as people living there with “big” problems.
Political parties do nothing about “structural racism, discrimination and also the very low quality of life in these areas, legal services and so on.”
This is a very well-known study by Kamali, but “it seems that it did not influence political parties to change their strategies,” he added.
Things to get worse for immigrants
Swedish politics changed when, during the refugee crisis in 2015, approximately 170,000 people came to Sweden.
– We see that from 2015 to now there is no party in Sweden that wants a better migration policy, says Kamali.
“They want the same restrictive policies as the EU.”
According to Kamali, political parties in the Nordic country shape the discourse in such a way that crime, for example, is something that immigrants import from other countries.
“I don’t think that people’s cultures and values should be an issue for a politician to talk about. They should talk about how to solve unemployment and how to solve other economic and social issues, but sometimes they talk too much about people’s background,” Busuladzic said.
He said this is not the way to reconcile the country or to “try to build cohesion” because in this way, he said, “they are only polarizing the country, and we oppose that, and that is why we have formed this party.”
The right-wing parties that appear to have won this election will make life “even worse for people with immigrant backgrounds because structural racism and discrimination will be reinforced,” Kamali said.
Far-right ideology is taking over
The far-right Sweden Democrats are now the second largest party in Sweden and also the largest party in the right-wing government.
This means that they will have enormous influence in Swedish politics.
Busuladzic believes that the Swedish Social Democrats have gone too far to the right just like the Danish ones, therefore they have lost the important immigrant votes.
“They should try to find issues that are important to this group. Instead, they have closed Muslim schools. They have proposed some laws that even right-wing parties have proposed,” he said.
That is why many people have “turned away from the Social Democrats and voted for Nyan’s party,” he added.
Did Nyan’s party decide the Swedish election?
The new party Nyans may have had a big impact in the parliamentary elections.
Sweden’s immigrants historically usually vote for the Social Democrats, but this time Nyans took over a large part of the votes in the municipal elections in Malmö and Gothenburg, and in the same district “other parties” received a large part of the votes in the parliamentary elections.
Anders Sannerstedt, political scientist at Lund University, believes that their success has come at the expense of the Social Democrats.
“It’s a concern for the Social Democrats, because many of those who are now voting for Nyans would otherwise have voted for them,” he said.
Sannerstedt believes that the party Nyans mainly took votes from the Social Democrats.
“Obviously it could have been taken from elsewhere as well, but the Social Democrats are the big party in these groups,” he added.
Busuladzic said that there has been a lot of negative focus on his party and that the major parties have tried to scare people into voting for them by saying that the far right can win and this will be bad for them, “but we don’t. I don’t see it that way because we see that the left party has used a lot of rhetoric that is not really good for this population, which wants to be included and not be used as a bad example.”
According to the preliminary results, the coalition of right-wing parties led by the Moderates has secured 175 seats in Sweden’s Riksdag, while the left-wing coalition led by the ruling Social Democrats has secured 174 seats.
With 210 out of 212 constituencies counted, Nyans received 2.8% in the Malmö election, and it falls just short of the 3% required to take a seat in the municipal council in Malmö, according to preliminary figures from the Electoral Authority.
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