The fight to save Sweden’s soul from the far right

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, can Sweden get its soul back?

0:20För det Sverige behöver, det är en regering som tar Sverige på allvar. Hours before polls closed on Sunday, Sweden's centre-left opposition leader Magdalena Andersson Played her final ace in her push to keep the far right out of government

0:45Benny from ABBA, he's the one with the beard, was in the house En liten tröd du låt på dig, ni får vara med och konga Ja! He asked them if they'd like to hear a little tune

1:07It was as awkward as political singalongs always are With the chorus changed to celebrate the woman They hope will be Sweden's next prime minister

1:23Benny said he usually resists requests to be rolled out like a mascot To be used like a kutterschmiker, he said Literally a figurehead on a ship

1:37But the fact he even agreed to appear at the political rally Shows how high he thought the stakes were in this election where voters were deciding whether Sweden should carry on down the anti-immigration authoritarian route of recent years.

2:01At the time we're recording this, it looks as though Magdalena Andersson will soon lead the next Swedish government. She seems to have narrowly thwarted a right-wing coalition, including a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. It's a result that will give hope to centre and left-wing parties around the world as they face far-right insurgents of their own. But will the new government radically change course? Or are we unlikely to see a return anytime soon of progressive, egalitarian Sweden? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd, today in Focus. Where will Sweden go next?

2:42Martin Kellan, du är en svensk journalist som writes en column för den svenska späckning Dagens Nyhörte. Jag har fått den här pronunciationsnära. Du recently wrote en article för oss på The Guardian. Det var headländen, Sweden har lost its soul and stopped being Sweden. Define for mig vad den svenska späckning. Vad does det mean för dig? Och vad du tycker är true svenska späckning? Ja, jag har ju att vi kallar oss en humanitärn superpåver. And we used to take pride in being a force for good in the world and a strong voice for democracy and human rights and sustainability. We were very eager to be seen as a kind of beacon in the climate green transition.

3:22So yeah, that has really been challenged by the conservative turn. Over the last four years. And your argument, the argument that you set out in The Guardian, is essentially that many previously unthinkable far-right ideas are now pretty comfortably embedded in the mainstream of Swedish politics. And we're going to come on later to talk about whether Sweden's new government, whoever they may be, will reject such ideas. But tell us about the government that has been in charge in Sweden over the last four years. Right, so the Conservative coalition won the last election four years ago with a tiny margin.

3:58And they were only able to form a government with the help from the far right, even though the prime minister Ulf Kristesson had promised Holocaust survivors never to form a formal coalition with the far right. But they formed an agreement shortly after the election. And that meant in practice that the far right was pretty much, you know, holding the other three conservative parties hostage. So they've been completely setting the agenda. It's been a very significant shift to openly xenophobic rhetoric, openly xenophobic policies. We've had a very authoritarian turn in crime policy with imprisonment of children as young as 14.

4:47Vi har sett deputation orders for 8-month-old babies, for 4-year-old children with autism, still wearing diapers. Families har blivit upp, blivit blivit tillbaka till war zones after decades in the country. Can you just tell us a bit about the Sweden Democrats? And we need to be careful here not to confuse them with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats on Magdalena Andersson's party. She is the woman that we heard being serenaded at the start. The Sweden Democrats are the far-right party. They are the party that Ulf Kristapsson, the prime minister, his moderate party has been working with them over the past four years.

5:26And as you say, they haven't officially been in government, but they've been kind of the kingmakers. They've been making the political weather because the ruling government have relied on their votes to pass. I hope I got that right. Yeah, exactly. So the Sweden Democrats, they were formed in the late 1980s And they grew out of a kind of explicitly violent skinhead neo-Nazi movement that was called Keep Sweden Swedish. So, you know, it was really a band of hooligans when it was founded. But then in the 90s, they cleaned up, they started wearing suits, they started, you know, watching what they said.

6:04And very methodically, gradually over the years, they started winning local elections and then finally entered parliament. And they have tried to kind of, you know, polish their image a little bit. But it's still, you know, the policy platform and what they actually stand for and what they actually represent is still openly xenophobic. It's an open challenge to many of the democratic foundations of Sweden. Yeah. Free press and independent press. och den idea av equal rights för alla. Om Syrien kom och remained halal och went till mosk, och celebrated Ramadan rather than Christmas, är det i sig problematisk?

6:46Jag skulle säga det är problematisk, ja. Vad om järnlande järnland? Jag skulle säga det är inte en del av den svenska traditionen. Hur kan du vara järnlande? Det var Jessica Olsson, den former chair av den Youth Wing av den svenska-demokraterna, talking to The Guardian back in 2015. She's no longer in the party. But what sort of a party are they these days? They still have constantly plagued by scandals, that they have ties to neo-Nazis, that they have ties to Russia. They definitely belong to the most extreme right of all the kind of nationalist that we have in European politics today. And in the last election four years ago, Hur väl did they do?

7:32Were they in second place? Is that right? Yeah, they were. So they were bigger than the Conservative Party, the Moderate Party. And when it comes to them doing so well last time around, how much do you think that was a reflection of the large numbers of asylum seekers, refugees who had sought sanctuary in Sweden in the 2015-2016 era, where I think 10 ,000 asylum applications were being made every week? Was it a response, a reaction against that kind of welcome culture that Sweden had at the time? Absolutely. I mean, immigration has been on top of their agenda since the beginning. And with the surge of migrants applying to stay in Sweden in 2014 and 2015, that definitely helped them grow.

8:22Starting a new life in a new country. Two months ago, the Malki family made a harrowing journey from Syria to Sweden. The country's open arms policy means there's been a huge influx of Syrians. Angela Merkel and the Swedish government, we called ourselves the humanitarian superpowers we were going to take care of. Refugees from Syria, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from East African countries. Numbers have increased dramatically since Sweden announced last month that Syrians seeking asylum would be given permanent right of residence. We're just looking for somewhere safe, Khaled says, and the only safe place is Sweden.

9:00Och att först, det krävde en real grassroots humanitarian response i Sverige, där volunteers öppnade hjälpcentrums och de demographics i Sverige är rapidly changing. Och de har ändå. I mean, när jag var born i den late 1970s, Sverige var en av de mest ethniskt homogenes countries i Europa. And nu är det en av de mest diverse. Det är som diverse som Det UK och franske Is det really? Vad percentage av den populationen är bort outside of Sweden? Jag tror att det är lite mer än 20 % av den populationen är nu foreign-borten i Sverige Och den svenska demokraten, den far-right var egentligen able att harnas den kind av fear att det var en radikal transformation av Sverige De harnasd att fear into building en mycket bigger party Jag vill Sverige

9:58This is Jimmy Åkesson. He has been the leader of the Sweden Democrats for more than 20 years. Om vi har 20 % av den populationen som inte är svensk eller inte adaptat till kultur och sätt av livs, vi har alla de problemen. Det är därför det är viktigt för mig och det är därför det är viktigt för många av de vänsterna.

10:34And so the government of the last four years has been led by a guy called Ulf Christensen from the Moderate Party. Tell us a bit more about how his coalition have tried to reduce the number of people arriving in Sweden and also make Sweden a less hospitable place for immigrants. Right. Yeah, I mean, they have made it much harder to come to Sweden, but also for people who are there to stay and to get permanent residency. So, you know, they've increased income thresholds. So it's not just, sorry, so it's not just been about asylum seekers and refugees. It's all these immigrants across the board.

11:09Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I mean, we've seen in British media, including The Guardian, we've seen these reports on British citizens, right, who have been sent back from Sweden. And including, like, a case that I also wrote about of a longtime employee at the World Bank who had a very, very generous retirement. but retirement money isn't counted as income so he didn't reach the salary threshold to get a permanent residency so he was denied that so in total my income is about 3 million krona a year and yet I'm being told I can't support myself which is mind boggling it doesn't make sense to us so yeah we're seeing all these absurd cases widows who lose their husband and then they're told to leave the country even though they lived there for 30 years I can't believe that my life is ending like this.

11:57I can't believe it. At the place that I've been for 22 years, my husband's grave, it's indescribable. I'm not going to start crying. I don't want to cry. This really inhumane, harsh consequences of immigration policy that hurts everybody. Ja, och det är ganska dramatiskt att se vad som har hänt att denna av asylum seekers som har blantat i Sverige. Så i 2016, almost 70 ,000 asylum seekers var allowed att stå. Det är en liten, inte det, för ett land av 10 millioner. Och last år, denna nummer hade droppat till runt 2 ,500. Sweden has gone from the country in Europe that accepted the highest numbers of asylum seekers per capita to having one of the strictest thresholds and the highest thresholds against asylum seekers.

12:49Ilyet Taharecki arrives early to open up his mother's hairdressing business in Stockholm. After years of temporary residency, he then got a message from the Swedish authorities when he turned 18. Utwisning, deportation, and would be sent back to Iran. I don't speak the language. I haven't been raised like them. So I don't even know how to talk. And how have they made it harder for people to stay? I saw some mention of this kind of vaguely worded criteria of bad behaviour. So not necessarily criminal behaviour, but bad behaviour could see you deported. Tell me about that. Right. It's a Swedish word called vandal, which means, yeah, it's really hard to kind of translate it in any other way.

13:27It's one of those words you kind of saw 100 years ago to kind of just, you know, for the giving law enforcement the right to kind of arbitrarily arrest anyone they were uncomfortable with. It's such an arbitrary policy that it's almost designed to just create fear. And it obviously also is very hypocritical because, you know, I mean, the migration minister himself had a family member who was revealed to have ties to a far right terrorist group. So by his own standards, his family wouldn't be allowed to stay in Sweden. Right. And I read that this summer Sweden's parliament voted quite narrowly to back what's been translated in English as a snitch law that will require many public sector workers to report anyone that they believe is undocumented.

14:16Tell me about that and how that's working so far. Yeah, right. That was really one of the most controversial bills that basically meant that anyone working in the public sector, daycares, nurses, retirement home workers, were supposed to really report anything they saw that suggested that someone wasn't fully legally in the country. Or that someone was committing these minor acts of transgression that would make them deportable with the new rules.

15:02So it sounds like what's been created in the past four years is a very hostile environment for immigrants. But one of the things that has sort of filtered through, I think, to British media is the idea that since Sweden has become more diverse that it has developed a problem with crime and particularly gang warfare. Stockholm's suburbs were built as part of a vision of social cohesion. Now they're synonymous with gang warfare, a mounting death toll and a divided society. And that a country that we all thought of, as you described it, started as being kind of peace loving, you know, IKEA, meatballs, ABBA, all these lovely things.

15:37It's like, oh, actually, it's starting to sound like a slightly frightening place. To what extent is that a real problem? And were immigrants to blame for that? There hasn't really been like an overall significant steep rise in crime, but we have seen this real rise in gang violence and brutal killings and, you know, gangs recruiting 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, you know, sending them out to do horrific acts of violence. And we've seen bombings go up. In Sweden, a woman has died after what police believe may be the latest in a series of explosions linked to a gang war. The attacks are said to be part of a long-running feud between two rival gangs in a turf war of drugs and weapons.

16:21It's definitely a real problem. It's not some fantasy from the far right. Sweden has gone from being one of the safest countries in Europe to having one of the highest numbers of shootings in Europe. And some of it has, you know, come from the fact that we had this kind of failed policy of integration where a lot of migrants were placed in housing where they weren't able to work and become members of society. So the gap between the humanitarian ambitions of Sweden and the fact that on a kind of ground level a lot of Swedish municipalities were kind of uncomfortable with having all these new arrivals in their neighborhoods.

17:06The Social Democrat mayor is a disciple of Sweden's humanitarian policy. She also believes other towns aren't doing enough to share the burden. Jag tror att vi kan vara den bästa land i världen att få flerare. Men det måste vara en national responsabilitet. Det är inte några municipallar som ska ta den responsabiliteten för att få flerare. Det är den bästa starten. Så realt som de problemen är, de har också varit väldigt exagerat by a surge of far-right media and by foreign influence operations that have made this appear to be a kind of existential threat to all of Swedish society. Yeah, this is all sounding very familiar, I have to say, to the sort of arguments that we hear from the hard rights in Britain.

17:57For sure.

18:01Coming up, why the far-right Sweden Democrats har just recorded deres worst result in decades.

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18:51You know, you've spent most of your adult life out of Sweden. And I know you were in the US for, what, 20 years? Is that right? Yeah. And I wonder when you look at what's happened in your home country over the past four years, Do you see any parallels with what you've witnessed in the two terms of Trump? Yeah, I mean, and that's why I feel so alarmed by what's happening. It's really a kind of Trumpism light. Even though Trump only has about 15 % approval in Sweden, we've really seen Ulf Kristesson and Jimmy Åkesson, the two conservative right-wing leaders. They have transformed right-wing politics in Sweden away from these ideals of openness and tolerance and optimism and progress and just accepting climate policies as an inevitable part of modern life.

19:48The Christian Democrats, one of the main parties in the coalition, one of their main messages in this election was to imprison climate activists. Really? So it's really Trumpian in a lot of ways. And the attacks on journalists, the relentless kind of questioning of facts and science. It's really terrifyingly reminiscent of what I saw in the US. Yeah. And a bit like Trump declaring himself the fertilization president. I see that Gullas prime minister was also on a mission, wasn't he? To get more Swedish women to have more babies. Has he had any success in increasing the birth rate? I mean, there are very recent policy changes.

20:32So to be fair, I think, you know, if there will be any increases in fertility, I might not know about it yet. But yeah, I mean, he subsidised or increased funding for IVF. Yeah, from first-time parents used to get three free rounds. Now he's up to six. I guess there's a pragmatic acknowledgement there that if you don't have any immigrants to replace the population, you do need to do something about it. Right, and that's what, you know, there are kind of, you know, progressive elements of this policy that might not very offensive, but then there are, you know, it's also tied to the fact that he has an informal coalition with the far right that talks about the great replacement, you know, and very explicitly want the white majority in Sweden in the future.

21:18And that's obviously the big challenge right now in Europe. You have all these far-right and nationalist parties that want to deport everybody and restrict immigration. But at the same time, they're realizing who's going to work in the hospitals and the retirement homes. Now we must wait for the final election result. But right now we are leading. If this holds, Sweden will have a new government. Sverige får en ny regering. At the time we're recording this, it does look like the left-leading opposition bloc led by Magdalena Andersson. Socialdemocrats have won the most seats, albeit very narrowly.

22:00So with about 95 % of votes counted, they are just 33 ,000 votes ahead with a three-seat majority over the right-wing alliance that has been in charge for the past four years. Now the final result isn't expected until Thursday, but assuming that these preliminers results are correct, Why do you think that the left won? Yeah, no, I mean, we saw a retreat for the far right and we saw gains for the left party and the Green party and the Social Democrats actually, there were selection in 100 years. Really? Even though they topped the polls, right? It may have been enough, but it's a very, very fragile victory and it's definitely a time for reassessment on the center-left in Sweden.

22:41So yeah, it's been a small reaction of the Trumpification of Sweden, but it's also... Not exactly a resounding one, yeah. It also confirms the normalisation of a lot of it, right? So yeah, both of those things are now coexisting in Sweden, and I think they will keep battling each other for a foreseeable future. And in terms of the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party, it looks as though they've lost at least 11 seats. Their vote share has dropped from 20.5 % to 17.6 % of the vote, which is their worst decline. And that is the only decline that they've actually seen since they entered parliament in 2010.

23:22Why do you think their vote seems to have fallen? Yeah, I mean, if we look at the election data, they have failed to gain new voters. And I think this is a very interesting kind of reaction of this narrative that young men particularly are all inevitably going to fall for the far right. Young men swung very, very heavily to the left in this election compared to the last one. So, and I mean, young women were the most solid voting group for the left. Så young voters har inte felt the appeal av den svenska demokraterna och den far-right. Och vad tror du att den svenska demokraterna kommer att ta från den här defaet?

24:05Do du att de är för att ha, okej, vi är ut av step med den nästa generation av svenska demokraterna? Eller tror du att de ska ta sig och tänka, du vet vad, vi ska gå även förr att ta den här. De har inte det i dem att göra self-reflection och kompromis. And they always act as though they are the inevitable majority. But there was a retreat for the far right. And it's very rare to see that right now in European politics. And there might be lessons to be learned from other countries. Yeah, maybe it's the proximity to government. They might not have been officially in government, but maybe the proximity to government.