First
we take Hässleholm … Swedish far-right rises
Sweden
Democrats have risen in the polls on an anti-immigrant message to
threaten the mainstream.
By RICHARD
ORANGE 2/10/17, 4:05 AM CET
HÄSSLEHOLM, Sweden
— When the leader of the Moderates, Anna Kinberg Batra, recently
announced that her party would be open to negotiating with the Sweden
Democrats, it sent shockwaves through the establishment.
Many accused Kinberg
Batra of ripping up the cordon sanitaire which has prevented
far-right populists in Sweden from winning the kind of influence they
have achieved in neighboring Denmark and Norway, and elsewhere on the
Continent.
“You will be
sitting and negotiating with a party that you yourself say is racist
and pro-Russia,” Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said in response to
the news, arguing that his opponent had ”lost her political
compass.”
Even the Moderates’
allies in the centre-right Alliance bloc were unhappy, with Liberal
leader Jan Björkland calling the move an “unfortunate gambit.”
Both he and Centre Party leader Annie Lööf have said they would
never be part of a government formed with the active support of the
Sweden Democrats.
But the Sweden
Democrats — which have been surging in the polls — will likely be
in a position to wield real power after next year’s election. And
the blessing by the Moderate leadership to allow MPs and local
councilors to start talks with the SD is clearly helping sanitize a
party that, until now, has been cut out of mainstream politics over
links to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
Unlikely alliance
In Hässleholm, a
town in northern Skåne, a stronghold for the Sweden Democrats, Ulf
Erlandsson, the local SD leader, looks every inch the maverick in
black jeans, trainers and a floral shirt. At the end of this month,
he intends to join forces with the centre-right Moderates to oust the
ruling Social Democrats, whose budget the two parties have blocked
from being voted through.
He hopes the Social
Democrat council chairman will resign at a meeting on February 27
and, in exchange for supporting the Moderates’ appointee to replace
her, expects to be made his deputy.
The collaboration
between SD and the Moderates in this area will be the first of its
kind in Sweden and if he gets made vice chairman, Erlandsson will be
the first Sweden Democrat to take such a position in Sweden, “so
it’s nice,” he said. “But I think it will soon be happening all
over the country.”
Indeed, Erlandsson
believes the winds of change blowing through Skåne are the same ones
that have brought Brexit and Trump and have upset the upcoming
elections in France and Germany.
In November, he made
a speech in the council chamber, celebrating the election of U.S.
President Donald Trump. “I said that those people who wanted to see
a woman president … just have to wait for it to happen in France,”
he said.
His party’s
support has soared in recent years on the back of growing disquiet
over migration. Last year, Sweden, a country of 9.5 million people,
granted residency to a record 150,000 immigrants. As the number of
asylum seekers has dipped, the party has turned its focus to law and
order concerns in areas with large immigrant populations.
At the height of the
refugee crisis in 2015, party activists posted the addresses of all
asylum centers in and around the city of Lund.
But despite leader
Jimmie Åkesson’s moves to soften the party’s image, it continues
to be dogged by scandals involving racism.
An MP was sacked
last year for proposing that the Bonniers newspaper group, whose
family owners are Jewish, be broken up because no “ethnic group”
should be allowed to “control more than five percent of the media.”
At the height of the
refugee crisis in 2015, party activists posted a map listing the
addresses of all asylum centers in and around the city of Lund, a
move criticized as inviting anti-immigrant activists to commit arson
attacks.
A big deal
Last week, Moderate
party officials held their first official meeting with their Sweden
Democrat counterparts on cooperation in the Riksdag, Sweden’s
parliament.
“It’s a really
big deal [although] it was very probably a matter of time,” said
Nicholas Aylott, associate professor at Södertorn University, who
sees the shift as part of a necessary realignment of the party system
since the growth of the Sweden Democrats deprived alliances on the
left and on the right of the chance of a majority.
“I still think
we’ve got a long way before the Sweden Democrats get anywhere near
ministerial positions,” he said. “What’s more likely is some
understanding where SD would passively support a centre-right
government.”
Kinberg Batra, who
has repeatedly described Sweden Democrats as “racist in its
actions,” put a stop to her party’s backroom negotiations with
the SD in Hässleholm as recently as December, saying: “I do not
want us Moderates to enter into cooperation with the Sweden Democrats
on any level.”
Her sudden shift has
left Moderate MPs grumbling, mostly off-the-record, that they were
never consulted. And at least three former Moderate ministers have
criticized the move publicly.
Mikael Odenberg,
defense minister in the last Moderate government, wrote an article on
Monday, calling for a grand coalition with the Social Democrats
rather than negotiations with a party whose policies on most issues,
he said, are “a total joke.”
“Is limited
cooperation with SD possible?” asked Sten Tolgfors, a former trade
minister, on Facebook. “Is it desirable? Will you influence one
another through cooperation? Will the political climate be affected
by it?”
In Hässleholm,
Douglas Roth, who hopes to be appointed chairman of the council this
month if all goes to plan, argued the move was a return to sanity.
The last Moderate government’s “open hearts” in terms of
immigration and its refusal to put in place tougher policies proposed
by then-immigration minister Tobias Billström, was the reason his
party came third in the municipality, he said.
“We saw that
people were horrified by the immigration politics we were driving
forward,” he said. “If we had brought in the politics that
Billström wanted, we wouldn’t have had the Sweden Democrats with
16 percent of the votes.”
He is not alone. A
poll by Inizio found that 82 percent of Moderate voters supported
Kinberg Batra’s move while a clear majority of Moderate local
councilors, approached by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, welcomed the
possible collaboration.
The Moderates are
already moving to detoxify the Sweden Democrats’ image among
voters.
Roth admits that
talks have already taken place in Hässleholm, contradicting the
claims of Pär Palmgren, the local party leader, that there is no
cooperation.
For Roth, it comes
down to arithmetic. The Social Democrats have 20 seats in Hässleholm
and, with their allies, hold 30 seats on the council, leaving them
one crucial vote short of a majority. The Moderates, with just eight
seats, are far short of a majority, even with all of their Alliance
partners, unless they get the support of the Sweden Democrats and the
local Folkets Väl party, which would earn them 31 votes.
Authoritarian roots
The maths looks
similar across Sweden. In Gävle municipality, half-way up the Baltic
coast, the Moderates at the start of last year ended more than a
hundred years of Social Democrat rule, again with the passive support
of the Sweden Democrats. Kinberg Batra’s move opens the way for
more to do so.
The Moderates are
already moving to detoxify the Sweden Democrats’ image among
voters.
Kinberg Batra’s
latest line is that her party would neither form a government with
the Sweden Democrats nor with the Left Party as “both have
authoritarian roots.”
The underlying
message is that ruling with the passive support of a party whose
founders had links to the neo-Nazi movement is no different from the
way the Social Democrats often have done with the former Communist
party, whose previous leaders supported Joseph Stalin.
“It’s wrong to
call SD such a terrible and disgusting party,” Roth said. “The
Social Democrats want you to see them like that because they want to
be able to stay in power. Half of SD’s members are old Moderates.”
In Hässleholm,
Erlandsson can’t wait to move into his council office. “I don’t
have a key, but I will next month!” he said with a laugh. “I will
have a big office on the second floor. It feels very good.”
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