There is good and bad news after Sunday’s parliamentary elections. The bad news is that the far-right Sweden Democrat saw its support rise by 4.7 percentage points to 17.6% compared with the elections in 2014, according to Svenska Dagbladet. The good news – if it can be considered as such – is that the result was well below expectations.
Writes The Local: “But the pre-election polls had clearly got into their [Sweden Democrats] heads: YouGov had them polling at 25 percent and becoming Sweden’s biggest party – the same YouGov that got the party right last time. Other pollsters said they’d adapted their methods and were better equipped this time to gauge the SD vote, with Ipsos and Demoskop for example putting them around the 18-19 percent mark. But who could really tell?”
Read the full story (in Swedish) here.
Certainly, Sunday’s election result will make Social Democrat Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s job difficult in forming a new government. The present situation may mean the Social Democrats forming a government with a right-wing party that would exclude the Sweden Democrats.
The fact that the Sweden Democrats became the country’s third-largest party – not second-largest, according to some polls – and that migration and crime took the front seat of the political debate, reveals something disturbing about the Nordic countries. Norway, Finland, and Denmark, whose far-right Danish People’s Party does not form government but supports it, all have seen the rise of the populist anti-immigration parties.
How is it possible that Nordic countries, which profess being the most liberal and which base their social policy on equality could be so xenophobic and Islamophobic?
The answer to that question is not difficult to answer: The Nordic countries have as well issues with racism. Their exceptionalism blinds them from seeing themselves in the mirror.
When we concentrate just on issues like migrants and crime, we lose sight of the real problems that need fixing.
The post below by Richard D. Wolff wraps it up pretty well below.
Read the original Facebook posting here.