On Sunday, as many as a quarter of Swedes will vote for the far-right, pro-'Swexit' Sweden Democrats Party in what would be an astonishing departure for a country seen a bastion of liberalism — so what has happened?
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| In 2010 SD leader Jimmie Akesson emphasised his nationalist credentials by dressing in traditional Swedish costume to enter parliament |
FROM his drab Swedish high-rise estate, Tim Sjolin gestures across a busy dual carriageway to a neighbourhood he says is “like an alien country”.
The area of looming tower blocks he is pointing at is gang-plagued Herrgarden — where 85 per cent of the residents were born outside Sweden.
On the eve of knife-edge elections that are poised to catapult a far-right party with neo-Nazi links into power, unemployed butcher Tim, 31, insists: “There’s been too much immigration.
“We can’t take care of them all — we can’t even take care of our own people as well as we should.”
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| A Somali migrant in the city of Flen |
On Sunday, Tim and perhaps as many as a quarter of Swedes will vote for the far-right, pro-“Swexit” Sweden Democrats (SD) Party in what would be an astonishing departure for a country seen a bastion of liberalism.
The party is currently the largest in Sweden with YouGov giving it 24.8 per cent of the vote, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats — who have won every election since 1917 — on 23.8 percent.
So what has happened to this usually quiet corner of Europe, home of Abba, Bjorn Borg, Volvo and the ubiquitous furniture store Ikea?
For the answer to this question you need only travel 26 miles from Copenhagen in neighbouring Denmark across the Oresund Bridge — made famous by Nordic TV thriller The Bridge — to Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city that is now at the frontline of Sweden’s identity crisis.
Indeed, the ring road dividing Tim’s Almgarden flats in the Malmo neighbourhood of Herrgarden — part of the Rosengard suburb — has become a faultline for EU politics.
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| Cross the Oresund Bridge — made famous by Nordic TV thriller The Bridge — and you'll reach Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, which is now at the front line of the country's identity crisis |
In the wake of Italian, Austrian and German elections, the EU is bracing itself for another breakthrough success for a far-right populist party.
Tim — whose estate has long been a hotbed of SD support — insists one street in Herrgarden is a “no-go area” at night. Known as The Ghetto, it is awash with guns and drugs.
Ten people have been shot dead in Malmo already this year, despite police crackdowns on gang violence. In January, Rosengard’s police station was bombed.
Police blame criminals from migrant backgrounds.
When we visit Herrgarden, three Iraqis in a BMW glare menacingly until they hear our English accents.
“We thought you were cops,” one eventually laughed.
Doing her grocery shop in an Arabic corner shop, headscarf-wearing Rabia Arif, 30, originally from Lahore in Pakistan, shakes her head when asked about the SD election surge.
The mum-of-one said: “I’m worried. If they come into Government they’re not going to want migrants in Sweden.”
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| SD leader Jimmie Akesson once called his nation’s Muslim population 'the biggest foreign threat since the Second World War' |
Her fears may be well-founded.
SD leader Jimmie Akesson once called his nation’s Muslim population “the biggest foreign threat since the Second World War”. He wants to stop asylum seekers coming to Sweden and to ban full-face veils in public. In 2010 he emphasised his nationalist credentials by dressing in traditional Swedish costume to enter parliament.
Sweden’s centre left prime minister Stefan Lofven, of the Social Democrats, has described the party as “a neo-fascist single-issue party” with “Nazi and racist roots”.
SD began life in 1988 as a white supremacist group. They eventually traded bovver boots for business suits and on Sunday may become the country’s largest party, according to some predictions.
Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Sweden’s Lund University, said: “There are still neo-Nazis in the party but they’ve been more careful this time vetting candidates.”
At Malmo’s Central rail station, we meet a local SD councillor and parliamentary candidate who hardly fits the knuckle-dragging mould. Iran-born Nima Gholam Ali Pour’s first home in Sweden as a five-year-old was a refugee camp before his family moved to the Rosengard “ghetto”. The former primary school teacher insisted: “There are a lot of people with a migrant background in the party.
“Our programme is a conservative one without any extreme elements. When a person says something racist they are thrown out.”
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| From his high-rise estate, Tim Sjolin looks across a busy dual carriageway to the gang-plagued neighbourhood of Herrgarden — where 85 per cent of the residents were born outside Sweden |
A recent poll showed 12 per cent of foreign-born Swedes now support the Sweden Democrats. Mattias Karlsson, the party’s parliamentary chief, said: “A lot of the crime is happening in the suburbs where a lot of foreign-born people live.
“It’s their cars that are being burned. It is their children’s schools that are descending into chaos.”
His colleague Nima blames Sweden’s “liberal migration policy” for the failed integration of migrants following the refugee crisis.
The Nordic nation’s open-door policy saw almost a quarter of a million asylum seekers arrive in 2014 and 2015. More than 40,000 of the new arrivals were unaccompanied children, mostly boys. Schools and housing were overstretched.
Today, around a fifth of Sweden’s 10million people have foreign roots.
Nima, 36, explained: “We took too many people in too quickly — we didn’t have the capacity,”
SD also want to follow Britain’s lead and quit the EU.
“We want a referendum on membership and we want Swexit,” Nima added. “We don’t want bureaucrats in Brussels deciding on our laws — we want the representatives of the Swedish people to decide.” When he returned to Rosengard to campaign recently, Nima was abused in an area that votes heavily for the current PM’s centre left Social Democrats.
“People spat at us, called us traitors,” Nima revealed. “I was disappointed — some of these people were born in Sweden and feel that all Swedishness is their enemy.”
Rosengard — built in the late Sixties as housing for workers — is home to around 24,000 people mostly from a migrant background.
Ex-Man United star Zlatan Ibrahimovic grew up here. So did IS terrorist Osama Krayem, a suspect in the Paris and Brussels attacks, currently in a Belgian jail.
Like other migrant areas in Sweden’s big cities, Rosengard is plagued by violent crime, something the SDs are quick to underline.
More than 320 shootings and dozens of bombings were reported in Sweden in 2017. And there were more than 110 murders and 7,226 rapes — a ten per cent increase on 2016. Rosengard police inspector Mats Svensson says nearly all suspects in his area — and their victims — come from a migrant background.
“We can’t go on like this,” he said. “We need to stop mass immigration and take care of these neighbourhoods before racism starts to spread together with crime.”
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| There is opposition to the far-right SD, but it's predicted to get 24.8 per cent of the vote, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats |
Strolling past Rosengard’s Middle Eastern butchers and grocers, Ahmed Diini, 19, says he understands why crime and immigration are key issues at this election.
Born in Malmo to Somali parents, he revealed: “The Swedish Democrats are racist, they blame everything on immigrants. In Malmo we have a lot of shoot-outs. Often it’s immigrants shooting each other.
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| Ten people have been shot dead in Malmo already this year |
The after-school club teacher — who supports the Social Democrats — added: “It’s only a few immigrants who mess it up for the rest of us. Sweden has given many of us a new life. My father and mother arrived here from war. I am forever thankful.”
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| Police blame criminals from migrant backgrounds |
Back in the neighbouring SD stronghold of Almgarden, undecided voter, builder Pelle Svensson, 42, said: “People here see a foreign guy driving a BMW and get mad.
“Just because our immigration law has been s*** doesn’t mean you should vote for the SDs."
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