20 years ago, SD had 1.4 percent

This is the text of the comment. Analysis and attitudes of the writer.

A column headline after the 2018 election read, “Sweden is like everyone else.”

This year, it should be sharpened significantly. Sweden has become one of the most extreme countries in Europe.

In no other Western European country a far-right party has such a large share of the vote in parliament.

It is as if Sweden was only a few years behind in development. We moved in slow motion while others advanced, thinking that if we just tried to freeze right-wing populists, they would just disappear.

In Austria, the far-right FPÖ party has been in government since 1999. At the time, it was something no one had heard of. The rest of the European Union turned as one against the alliance. A comprehensive six-month diplomatic boycott was directed against the government in Vienna.

During the same period, right-wing extremism was hardly present in Sweden. In the 2002 parliamentary elections, SD received 1.4 percent.

But a far-right wave swept the other waves Europe Like an avalanche. Hungarian Fidesz and Polish PIS are in a class of their own. In Western Europe, the Italian party won Rest Just over 17 percent in the last parliamentary elections. such as the Austrian FPÖ and Marine Le Pens The national group of France.

But now they are being defeated by SD, which looks like it will end up above 20 percent.

When the Norwegian Progressive Party became the largest bourgeois party in Parliament in 2005, Sweden was horrified. The same when the Danish People’s Party became a support group for the bourgeois government there. Finland was a little more cautious, but the real Finns actually managed to sit in the government.

We considered our neighbors to the north pariahs.

But it didn’t take long before the roles are reversed. After the wave of immigration in 2015 and the explosion of gang crime and shootings, it was the other Nordic countries that were horrified by the “Swedish case”. A calamity where, according to them, the road leads only in one direction; Against chaos and decay.

Country after country in Europe has seen huge success for right-wing or far-right populist parties, whatever label they apply. For a long time, Swedes and others viewed Sweden as a bulwark of tolerance and humanity. Proof that a compassionate welfare society can survive in Trump’s world, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini Geert Wilders.

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Early in the 2018 election, this picture was significantly corrected. SD received 17.5 percent of the vote. But none of the other parties wanted to take them with the forceps. Borders that have long been crossed in all European countries, with the exception of Germany.

After this year’s elections, suffice it to say that Sweden now belongs to the most extreme country in Europe. Aside from parts of Eastern Europe, the far right is not that strong anywhere else.

Even if Jimmy Okeson had no influence on the next government, we are now a country forced to look at itself for a new self-image. This idyllic, sparkling home of Bullerbyn, the home of the people, no longer exists.

Many Swedes have realized this, but abroad the image of an ideal and prosperous Sweden still stands.

Now foreign people are pointing Commentators and journalists triumphed that even the Swedes were forced to realize that we are not as good and forgiving as we imagined.

Danish company Ekstrabladet has announced that the “token has finally gone down.”

So comments Hans-Peter Sjolie in the Norwegian newspaper VG.

Where you previously had a racist stamp etched on your forehead if you alluded to problems relating, for example, to social segregation along racial lines, now Prime Minister Magdalena Anderson herself uses expressions like “Somalitown”. This is how you should rub your eyes.

He believes that reality collided with the Swedes during the refugee crisis in 2015/2016.

– The Swedish Democrats won the battle for the story of the “people’s house” of our time – a dilapidated structure, built without adequate floor plans or plans for necessary maintenance.

German newspapers suggest, not without some glee, that the SD is a party with Nazi roots, while the German right-wing extremists, the AfD, were founded by a group of economists dissatisfied with the European Union. However, all major German parties have so far kept the crude march to the right. There is no cooperation with AfD.

It worked because in Germany they succeeded in working across the boundaries of the block. At first it was the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats who ruled together. The government now consists of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

Purely mathematical, it would be Such turrets across the block can keep SD out of influence.

But despite the fact that Sweden is in a state of crisis in many ways, something similar that is going to happen here seems like a utopia. A government consisting of, say, S + M + C is only possible on paper.

At the same time, the Danish newspaper Berlingske poses a very relevant question in its first election analysis.

“SD has over 1.5 million Swedes behind. The question is how long can the Social Democrats demonize such a large group of Swedes who vote for a Democratic Party.”

The train may have already left.

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Jimmy Okeson: Our ambition is to sit in government
Magdalena Anderson: We made a good choice
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