Sweden Democrats On Verge of Becoming Largest Party in Sweden

I've been working off a simple political model over the past few years.

One, social mood is trending negative. In a time of negative mood, voters are more likely to vote for politicians who oppose immigration and trade, and who start wars with foreign countries. If the populace isn't fighting a foreign enemy, they're going to fight a domestic one. Depending on the local conditions, shift expectations based on this. It's important to pay attention to intermediate- and short-term trends, as in the stock market, but the larger trend is negative mood.

Two, the establishment isn't very bright or is ideologically locked. They do not change their positions in response to changing voter mood (opinion), instead they move in the opposite direction. Immigration policy should have peaked in 2000 and become more restrictive over time as a natural course of events. Instead, Merkel launched a mass migration policy 15 years (!) into a mood change. The Democrats in the U.S.A. are calling for the abolition of immigration enforcement agents (ICE) today, effectively a call for open borders. This probably would have been a bad policy move in 2000, but it's really dumb when the mood has been moving the opposite way for nearly two decades. The only worse policies would be new wars and more bank bailouts.

Three, the establishment controls the media and shapes the debate. One reason why the establishment is dumb (in a functional sense) is that they are ignorant. They don't know that immigration restriction has been a winning issue for years because they control the mainstream debate. Many in the establishment and "mainstream" (those who get their information from establishment sources) avoid looking at data that strongly contradicts their world view. This isn't something that one side or the other has a monopoly on, but the broadly-termed "right" is exposed to "left" ideas through mainstream media, schools, and political debate, and thus gets exposed to all the broadly-termed "left" ideas. A bubble is developing on the right as well because of the fracturing media environment, but it has a long-way to go because they don't have a fully functional cocoon as the "left" does. Meanwhile, popular "right-wing" ideas spend years being debated online before they emerge into the public. Immigration restriction was basically off limits as a topic, an issue talked about by fringe candidates, until President Trump won with it.

Four, the establishment locks "the far-right" out of power. It doesn't matter if you're a libertarian or a left-wing socialist, if you adopt nationalist policies on a topic such as immigration you will be labeled "far right" and all major parties will exclude you from power. This gives the outsiders a total monopoly on the most important political issue as well as the winning position on that issue. Given enough time and a continued monopoly, eventually they will take power. (One nation where that may not be true is Denmark because the major center-left party turned "far right" on immigration.) There's hard evidence that this is taking place in Germany as explained in this 2015 post: This One Chart Explains the Next 10 Years of Political Change. The political establishment labels anti-immigration as a "far-right" policy. Over time, the "Overton Window" shifts "right" (in quotes because this isn't actually a left-right issue, but more a nationalist/globalist one) and the political center moves "right." All of the political parties that set themselves up in opposition to the "right" are drifting "left" over time as the center (the majority of voters) moves to the "far-right." The left-wing is almost non-existant in Poland and Hungary, it's why center-left and center-right parties are collapsing across Europe.

Back in 2014, I saw immigration becoming a major issue following UKIP's success in European parliamentary elections. (The Anglosphere countries have quite similar political cycles, particularly the US and UK.) I even saw that perhaps Trump might be the guy because he was often talking about immigration then. Trump took the issue and won it all in 2016.

Sweden is another example. Back in 2015 I wrote Nationalism Sweeps Europe. Quoting an article linked in the post:

“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.

I wrote:

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.

How are Sweden Democrats polling these days? Sometimes the most popular party:

Sweden votes on September 9. Sweden Democrats will not win power. They will also likely be iced out of government again. Yet they might score a high enough vote total, 25 percent or above, that makes them the only credible alternative and cements their status as "the largest party in Sweden." Then it is only a matter of waiting for the next recession, financial crises or major terror attack for Sweden Democrats to "shock" Sweden and the world.