Tag: Sweden Democrats

Brexit has left British political and social life more divided than ever. While the Brexiteers are peddling increasingly divisive – even violent – rhetoric, hundreds of thousands of “Remainers” recently marched through London, calling for a “people’s vote” to approve whatever exit deal the government proposes. According to a new report from the UK’s National Center for Social Research, support for or opposition to Brexit is increasingly supplanting party affiliation as the defining factor in British political identities. Specifically, the researchers find that, “Nearly nine in ten members of our panel said that they were either a ‘Remainer’ or a ‘Leaver,’ whereas less than two-thirds of them claim to identify with a political party.” British voters’ growing emotional attachment to Remain or Leave poses a serious challenge to the country’s main political parties, each of which has deep internal divisions over Brexit. So, even if the UK government can conclude withdrawal negotiations with the EU in the coming weeks, debates within Britain about the future UK-EU relationship will remain intense and protracted. One way to bridge the divide and heal Britain’s fractured politics is to forge a close but flexible “association agreement” of the kind that the European Parliament has proposed. Polling commissioned by the European Parliament finds that overall support for EU membership has increased significantly since the Brexit referendum. And as support for EU membership has increased, the Swedish Democrats have had to back away from advocating a full EU exit. Anti-EU parties have abandoned openly advocating the bloc’s destruction and begun to focus more on pushing center-right parties toward the populist and nationalist extremes. The writer is president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Group (ALDE) in the European Parliament and the author of Europe’s Last Chance: Why the European States Must Form a More Perfect Union.

Never mind the headlines: Sunday’s election in Sweden was a major setback for the far right. The populist-nationalist Sweden Democrats may have seen their percentage of the vote increase from 13 percent in 2014 to just shy of 18 percent this year, but they and many experts anticipated a much higher share; some even predicted that they would become the largest party in the country. Such an outcome would have been in keeping with their history of rapid growth, of more than doubling their previous tally in every election since 1998. This year, multiple parties —including the center-left Social Democrats and center-right Moderates—included calls for reduction in their platform. Those sentiments had no outlet in establishment politics, creating an opportunity for the Sweden Democrats. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven initially said there was theoretically no limit to the number of immigrants Sweden could embrace. In late November 2015, the center-left government, headed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party, initiated restrictions on refugee immigration. The Sweden Democrats had been right: Refugee migration was destabilizing the country. The country’s largest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, as well as the center-right Christian Democrats, adopted platforms calling for reduced immigration, and they carried those positions into elections this year. The far-right party will not have the opportunity to implement its long-desired reductions in immigration, or any other policy for that matter.

There's been a backlash to that wave of immigration, and now close to 1 in 5 Swedes say they'll vote for the nationalistic Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in the neo-Nazi movement. Sidsel Overgaard reports. LEIF AKEBERG: This is the Swedish Trump. OVERGAARD: Akeberg says the Sweden Democrats' policies are rooted in racism, plain and simple. But Giedra Andersson says that's not what it's about. OVERGAARD: Crime statistics are tricky. Sweden, by almost any measure, is an extremely safe country. MIKAEL SUNDSTROM: You don't need solid data to sell the idea, from the Sweden Democrats' point of view, that immigrants are linked to crime. Patrik Jonsson, who leads the Sweden Democrats in the Skane region, points to his counterparts in the Danish People's Party as a model for the future. For NPR News, I'm Sidsel Overgaard in Malmo, Sweden.