What to make of the Swedes? Until recently, Sweden was seen as one of the most liberal countries in Europe, or indeed anywhere. It was a social democracy that seemed to work, a contributor to world economic development well beyond what might have been expected for a nation its size (only 9.85 million people), a staunch supporter of both multiculturalism at home and multinationalism abroad.
Yet the most recent reports coming out of Sweden paint a far different picture. Immigrants are being discouraged from entering the country. Swedes of African origin or Jewish religion are being cursed, hounded, and harassed. And then there is the startling and rapid rise of a neo-fascist party, the Swedish Democrats.
In reality, Sweden has not changed all that much. There has always been a relatively small minority comprised of a nativist, indeed fascist cadre similar to those that have re-emerged elsewhere in Europe. The same Sweden that took in virtually the entire Danish Jewish population during World War II long had its share of Nazis; in 1934 the Nazi Party won more than a hundred seats in Sweden’s municipal elections. Since the end of World War II, Nazis and neo-Nazis have formed parties of various kinds and with various names, all of them short-lived, and none of them able to capture as many as 30,000 votes in national elections.
The Swedish Democrats are among the lineal descendants of these parties (there are other smaller neo-fascist parties as well). For the moment, they appear to be much stronger and better organized than their predecessors. Unlike the earlier parties, their success has both been sustained over the past decade and has resulted in their holding 49 seats in the current Swedish Riksdag, or Parliament. Much of their strength is drawn from voters in southern Sweden, notably the areas around Malmo and Helsingborg, where there has been a rapid rise in the Muslim population, especially since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Indeed, in October 2015, Sweden was accepting 10,000 immigrants a week, a number that a country of 9.85 million simply could not sustain.
The Swedish Democrats claim that, while they are anti-immigrant, they are not anti-Semitic. That stance reflects a significant change from other neo-fascist parties, both contemporary and past, which as early as 1945 denied that the Holocaust ever took place. It is noteworthy, however, that it is the immigrants against whom the Swedish Democrats inveigh, or the children of these immigrants, who have perpetrated almost all the violence against Sweden’s small and highly assimilated Jewish population, notably the Jewish community in Malmo.
More generally, as in other countries, many of the Muslim immigrants have not assimilated to local culture; given their different ethnic background, their adherence to their own separate identity intensifies nativist and nationalist opposition to their presence in Sweden. In addition, a Riksdag report a found that two-thirds of refugees still cannot find employment after having lived in the country for 15 years—and therefore live off public funds. Moreover, there has been widespread reporting of a steady rise in the number of rapes perpetrated against Swedish women by immigrant Muslims. Not surprisingly, more and more Swedes view Muslims as a threat to their personal safety.
Despite all of the foregoing, Sweden remains far more liberal and open than many, if not most, of its European counterparts, or, for that matter, those Americans who support Donald Trump. Even as it has made it less appealing for Middle Easterners to migrate to Sweden by tightening border controls and cutting back on the benefits to be made available to immigrants, the government continues to provide welfare benefits to the thousands of immigrants who have arrived from Syria and elsewhere in the past few years. And despite having accepted 160,000 refugees in 2015 alone, it has announced that it expects more than 60,000 refugees to make their way to Sweden this year.
The governing coalition, led by the Social Democrats, as well as the conservative opposition, has refused to cooperate in any way with the Swedish Democrats. And ordinary Swedes appear to be having second thoughts about the party. Current polls show a decline in popular support for the Democrats, and an increase in support for the Moderate Party, which is projected to form the next government after the September 2018 elections. Both the current government and the Moderates who lead the opposition are committed to devoting more resources to foster the assimilation of Muslim migrants, and to confront intolerance both by and against Muslims that has upset the nature of this previously tranquil society. That of course, is far from an easy task, but with an economy that is among the strongest in Europe and a centuries-old tradition of political liberalism, the Swedes have a better chance of achieving their objective than most of their counterparts in the European Union.