National Post Article: Is Sweden Becoming More Xenophobic After Anti Muslim Party Gains Seats In Swedish Parliament?

Full Comment

Swedish voters say no to immigration

Araminta Wordsworth September 20, 2010 – 2:33 pm

Even Sweden, it appears, is tired of being a nation of open borders.

REUTERS/Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix

Jimmie Akesson, chairman of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, will enter Parliament at the head of a party with 20 seats after Sunday’s election.

Often held up as an example of a country Canada should emulate — high taxes, plentiful social services, hockey players who don’t fight — Sweden appears to be going the way of the Netherlands, that other allegedly tolerant country that makes an exception when it comes to immigrants.

On Sunday, Fredrik Reinfeldt’s centre-right coalition won marginally under 50% of the vote in  Sweden’s general election and will take 172 of the 349 seats. The Prime Minister also logged a personal victory by winning more votes for his party, the Moderates, than ever before.

Also entering Parliament — for the first time — will be the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, with 20 seats. Their success follows a string of electoral gains for similar parties  across Europe in such countries as the Netherlands, France, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Britain.

As in much of the rest of Europe, immigration was the issue that propelled them into power, more specifically Muslim immigration. Relative to its size, Sweden has been among the top five nations in the European Union in taking in refugees and asylum-seekers, including those fleeing the Balkan wars of the 1990s and Iraq after the U.S. invasion.

The new arrivals have changed the demography of the once-homogenous Scandinavian country. Today, one in seven residents is foreign-born. The Sweden Democrats say immigration has become an economic burden that drains the welfare system, one of the most generous in Europe.

Sanna Rayman, a correspondent for the conservative Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, says the elections results were predictable.

“Sweden is a baffled country today. At least seemingly so, at the surface.
Every newspaper seems surprised by the fact that a populist/anti-immigration party — the Sweden Democrats — has made it into parliament. Every politician has, in some way, expressed his or her feelings of shock.
This is despite the fact that everyone saw it coming … The polls have been telling us as much for a long time, and everyone knows that the Sweden Democrats have a habit of coming out stronger than their poll results.
This is also a part of the problem. For decades, the Sweden Democrats have been on the rise in the polls. No-one has taken this threat seriously — the only response has been to ‘demonize,’ not only the party, but more importantly the people who consider voting for them.
This has made the job of polling agencies difficult, since the shame factor makes people lie to opinion pollsters. But one also suspects that this demonization has actually contributed to the SD rise.”

At The Daily Telegraph, Bruno Waterfield and Matthew Day report on the party’s rise and rise.

“The previously marginal group … entered the mainstream by demanding cuts to immigration and by describing Islam as Sweden’s biggest national security threat since the Second World War.
Its election broadcasts, showing burka-clad Muslim women jumping the queue to take benefits from white Swedish pensioners, fuelled resentment over waves of immigration which have changed the make-up of Sweden, a once-homogenous Scandinavian country, where one in seven residents is now foreign-born.
‘The immigration policy is the most important issue in this election and we want that to be debated and we want the other parties to change their policy,’ said Jimmie Akesson, the group’s leader.”

Andrew Brown believes reporting from outside Sweden has helped fuel the xenophobia.

“If you believe the international right-wing press, the answer is simple, and has been since 2004, when Fox News made a special report on the subject: Sweden, and especially Malmo, has become a laboratory for the creeping Islamization of Europe. The most common child’s name there is now Muhammad; police dare not go into immigrant districts, where only sharia law is respected; and soon all the Jews will be driven from the city. All this, flecked with varying amounts of spittle, is recounted as fact on the net and in U.S. papers …
No one in Sweden believes there is any serious terrorist threat there, but Islam has become the symbol of all that is strange and menacing and un-Swedish about immigration.”

The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt analyzes the roots  of the anti-immigrant backlash.

“Firstly, there is the economy. There are fewer jobs. Fewer outsiders are needed. But the economic downturn provides only part of the answer. In both Germany and Sweden the economy is rebounding strongly.
There seems to be a growing fear about identity, of living in a fast-changing society where people’s known world recedes.
Much of this new populism is built on questioning whether Muslims can ever successfully integrate into the West. If they can’t, so the argument goes, then Europe risks developing into separate, parallel communities.
Many Muslims argue that they are barred from fully integrating into society, and so assert their own identity …
This new populist movement should neither be exaggerated — but neither can it be ignored. At its root it raises fundamental questions about the type of society Europeans want to live in. These parties tap into a desire for new arrivals to become ‘European.’ ”

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