Big gains for Swedish anti-immigration party
Posted by PTR on September 10, 2018 · Leave a Comment
Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson casting his vote in today’s general election
As counting ends after today’s general election in Sweden, the anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats have made significant gains, polling 17.6% of the vote and probably holding the balance of power. It will be impossible for the centre-right ‘Moderates’ to form a government without the support of the Sweden Democrats, while the ruling Social Democrats have slipped to their worst result since 1908 and can now only govern with the support of the extreme left.
In reality the Sweden Democrats (led by a former Moderates activist Jimmie Åkesson) are today ideologically similar to the right-wing of our Conservative Party, though when it was founded in the late 1980s the origins of the party were among hardline racial nationalists, including former members of the Waffen-SS.
The biggest reason for the party’s recent success has been the shocking ethnic transformation of Sweden, which within living memory was an almost entirely White country. Since 2015 the left-wing government has allowed the entry of 163,000 immigrants – and remember that Sweden has less than one-sixth the population of the UK. Sweden has for the last few years had the highest per capita immigration rate of any European country.
It will be very interesting to see whether the Sweden Democrats are allowed any role in government, in what was arguably the most consistently left-wing 20th century democracy. And if they are excluded from government, will the anti-immigration rage of the Swedish people be further inflamed?
