Sweden’s immigration history is an old one. Economic migrants have been coming steadily since the end of World War II, but many others have moved here throughout the last four decades seeking protection from war or persecution, in Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and other parts of the world. In 2015, most of the over 160,000 asylum seekers in Sweden were fleeing war in Syria. Recently, many Ukrainians have tried to get protection from Russia’s invasion earlier this year. And even if immigration has been decreasing since 2016, it seems to remain a hard political topic.
The Sweden Democrats (SD), the third largest party in Parliament, centre their discourse on what they believe to be the social and economic problems of immigration. But if we look at the last general election, in 2018, it seems that living among immigrants or people of immigrant background is not a direct predictor of someone’s vote in Jimmie Åkesson’s party.
The absence of a clear correlation between municipalities with a higher percentage of people with a foreign background (here we are considering foreign-born people, but also those born in Sweden to foreign parents) and votes for the SD is because the decision behind that vote has more to do with perceptions than people’s own reality.
Social scientists Kirsti Jylhä, Jens Rydgren and Pontus Strimling, from the Institute for Futures Studies, have looked closely at the motivations of SD voters.
Rydgren, a professor at Stockholm University, points out that the radical right has had good election results in Eastern European countries with extremely low immigration.
“Some voters dislike immigration whether it is high or low. And what counts is perception, not the actual level,", he explains. "Some voters are prone to overestimate the proportion of immigrants in an area. And sometimes, a change in the proportion of immigrants is more important than the actual level. That is, an increase from 2 percent to 4 percent may be seen as a dramatic change, even if the level is still objectively low."
The perception of how big immigration is can be tied to several factors, such as the influence of media and social media, which contribute greatly to those perceptions, as does education.
“Voters with university degrees are strongly underrepresented among the SD voters, which partly explains why SD support tends to be lower in the big cities, where the educational level is higher on average," he said.
In the map, you can see how SD has lower penetration in Sweden's three biggest cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö.
Criminality, culture change, and economic costs are the main concerns of those who have a negative view of immigration. “These views exist across society, they are not exclusive to SD supporters”, Jylhä, a researcher in psychology, explains. Still, studies show they are more prevalent in right-wing supporters than among those on the left of the political spectrum.
Attitudes also vary according to which groups of immigrants we are talking about. Not all immigrants are viewed the same, as Jylhä points out.
“There is research showing people differentiate between immigrant groups, and one of the factors is cultural distance,” she says.
This means people tend to have more positive attitudes towards immigrants coming from countries closer to theirs. In the case of Swedes, they are likely to have a more positive attitude towards people from other western countries, whose culture is in many ways similar to their own.
In general, Sweden still compares well with other European countries.
“Swedish people tend to have positive views of immigration in comparison with other European countries. The explanation for the growth of the Sweden Democrats is not that negative attitudes toward immigration would have notably increased but rather that immigration has been increasingly portrayed as a threat in political discussions and voters have started to see it as an important political topic", Jylhä says.
So is the anti-immigration vote rooted in racist or xenophobic beliefs? Research suggests racism and xenophobia aren’t the most important factors for voters of European radical right parties. Jylhä points out that anti-immigration vote is more about immigration as a phenomenon than about immigrants as individual people, although these views can be difficult to distinguish from each other.
This doesn’t mean that some of SD’s voters do not have racist or xenophobic beliefs, as many definitely do.
At this point, it is important to remember that The Sweden Democrats, even if they are perfectly integrated in the democratic system today, have roots in the extreme right. We can say that, as a political party, they have apparently moved away from those roots. This may have increased their success, Jylhä explains, because the public does not readily support parties that have overtly racist or xenophobic discourse, which is no longer socially acceptable. Voters prefer parties that they perceive as non-extreme and adhering to society’s norms.
As a party, we can say the SD’s nationalism and conservatism make them right-wing, and their wish to radically change society makes them radical – but not “extreme”. We can distinguish the extreme right from the radical right on the basis of the paths they take to achieve their goals.
“The radical right aims to work within the democratic system and not resort to violent means, even if it does not accept some fundamental elements of liberal democracy”, Jylhä explains. It tries to earn its place in democratic institutions through elections, and change society from within those institutions.
The Sweden Democrats can be placed the radical right category, among other European parties, such as the Vox in Spain, the Austrian Freedom Party or the Rassemblement National in France. Readers from other European countries might recognize the anti-immigration discourse or distrust in the mainstream media and political institutions from their own national parties. That is not a coincidence, these are part of a general trend in radical right European parties and not exclusive to The Sweden Democrats.
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