Nationalism Sweeps Europe

In Sweden, the Land of the Open Door, Anti-Muslim Sentiment Finds a Foothold

“It is a very difficult time in Sweden,” Dr. Groglopo said. “Now we can talk about things that we weren’t allowed to talk about before. It is a kind of coup d’état.”

Last month, the Sweden Democrats threatened to bring down Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s minority government. Early elections were averted only through a last-minute deal that observers say granted the anti-immigrant party even more power by pulling it from the sidelines and making it the primary opposition.

The party’s growth has occurred despite the fact that roughly a fifth of Sweden’s 9.6 million people were born abroad or to immigrant parents in Sweden. Most immigrants here have access to education, but government figures show a disproportionate unemployment rate for them, more than twice the national rate of about 8 percent. The disparity helped fuel riots in immigrant neighborhoods outside Stockholm in 2013.

This would have been a good article in 2002 or maybe 2005, when Sweden could have turned away from extremist immigration policies befitting peak social mood. Now it has gone far beyond anti-Muslim sentiment to anti-foreigner sentiment and pro-Swedish sentiment.

The way the political landscape is set up, the Sweden Democrats are in striking distance of taking power in Sweden. By icing them out with a deal that angers both the right and left (Left leader in surprise attack on government), the mainstream political center has completely ceded the issues of immigration and identity to the Swedish Democrats and made them the chief opposition. They have handed them the keys to the castle. This is because SD are socialists, but also nationalists. They offer a similar economic agenda to the mainstream, but couple it with immigration restrictions. As Nigel Farage pointed out last year,

but the key argument today isn't the battle between free markets and state control, the key battle today is about community and identity, who are we as nations? Who are we as communities? How do we want to live? And this stuff has all been threatened by excessive immigration, and by things like our small businesses being closed down and our communities changing. The politics of the future, the politics of the next decade is about community and identity.

Right and left will have strange bedfellows over the next decade. Nationalism is currently championed to varying degrees, by the liberal UKIP in the UK, the socialist Swedish Democrats, the socialist Syriza in Greece, right-wing Fidesz in Hungary and socialist National Front in France. The Swedish Democrats, case in point, are a left-wing party except for their stance on immigration. Yet they are presented in the mainstream media and NYTimes as a far right extremist party. Readers of the NYTimes and other mainstream outlets will be thoroughly confused by political developments in Europe in years to come.

The rise of nationalism in also Sweden proceeded slowly over the past decade or so, but the explosion of the PEGIDA movement in Germany in a warning on current social mood and the political environment.

Note this growing movement in Germany, which has already surpassed the peak popularity of the Tea Party: One German in eight would join an anti-Muslim march if a rapidly-growing protest movement organized one in their home towns, according to an opinion poll published on Thursday.

PEGIDA only started a couple of months ago. Even in a nation where there is currently no nationalist movement, one can arise almost immediately. This is also reflected in the electoral success of UKIP, who stumbled upon the immigration issue in 2014 and rode it to a shocking victory in EU and local elections, and perhaps many more in the general in 2015.