Losing Their Reputation: Have the Swedish Democrats Truly Reformed Beyond Their Extremist Roots?

Below is found the interview with Maja Asterhag, a Swedish Democrat representative.

From an international perspective, Sweden - and all of Scandinavia - tends to get idealised as a kind of liberal utopia. But one look at their current parliament, determined by the results of the 2018 election, and a very different possibility arises. With 17.53% of the vote and 62 of 349 seats, the Swedish Democrats [Sverigedemokraterna, SD] are the third biggest party in the Swedish Parliament [Riksdag]. This is the same Swedish Democrats whose founding members included Waffen-SS veteran Gustaf Ekstöm and whose history includes photographs of members wearing Nazi uniforms surfacing in the mid-1990s, recommendations of connections with the American National Association for the Advancement of White People, and a proposal to ban the adoption of foreign-born children. But considering the reforms within the party that have occurred since its foundation in 1988, how much does today’s Swedish Democrats really share with its gritty past beyond its name?

The first significant reform of the Swedish Democrats came in 1996, when wearing political uniform of any kind was banned. This came as a response to skinheads imposing on party meetings and the aforementioned photographs of members in Nazi uniforms. It was one of a set of reforms taken to make the party appear more presentable; other such reforms include the altering of the party logo from “a National Front-style torch to a baby-blue daisy”. These reforms do not alter the policies of the party in any way, instead they have self-serving goals of helping the party appear more legitimate: by reducing its visual association with extremism, the Swedish Democrats appeared more tolerant and appealed to a larger demographic of potential voters. An ex-member whistle-blower described these reforms as “largely PR-driven and meretricious”.

That isn’t to say the Swedish Democrats haven’t made significant reforms in the last 30 years. In 2003, the party adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2005, party leadership changed. The new party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, was the chairman of the Sweden Democratic Youth and an ex-Moderate. He began the process of expelling racist, fascist and extremist members of the party. In 2011, the party’s self description officially changed from “nationalist” to “social conservative”; in 2012, they introduced a “zero tolerance for racism”. However, the Brookings Institute highlights a major flaw in their zero-tolerance racism policy: anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiments are not considered worthy of expulsion. If they were, Åkesson himself would likely have been expelled from the party for his 2009 op-ed, which deemed Islam and Muslims as the ‘biggest foreign threat since World War II’ and claimed the ‘Islam and the Muslim world actively reject enlightenment and humanism’. Plenty of other MPs would have to go too: Richard Jomshof referred to Islam as ‘one of the worst ideologies in the world’; Gunilla Schmidt posted a statement of Facebook joking “Won’t someone get on Öresund Bridge with a machine gun!” in reference to the influx of refugees arriving from Denmark. Furthermore, Jonathan Leman, a researcher for the Swedish anti-racist magazine ‘Expo’, told DW although the policy exists on paper it is rarely upheld, “They spend more time telling people like you that they have this policy than reaching out to parts of the party and making sure that it is taught and lived”.

Additionally, they changed their stance to support same-sex marriage, with their gender-equality spokesperson advocating homophobes were ‘not welcome in [the] party’. Despite this, many prominent leaders within the LGBT+ community have refused their allyship, viewing it as a façade that allows them to further bash Muslims. After a member attempted to organise a gay pride parade, the official Stockholm Pride organisation and the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights put out a joint statement disavowing the event. Utilising hate crimes towards the LGBT community as an opportunity to scapegoat Islam is not a unique phenomenon; all throughout Europe, far right parties seem to be less and less homophobic, allowing them to blame any hate crimes on the Muslim immigrants in the same manner they use the statistics on crime against women. Personally, I see this scapegoating as reminiscent of the party’s fascist roots.

Since many of their reforms can be seen as having ulterior motives, I concluded that the best way to evaluate if real change had taken place within the heart of the party was to reach out and communicate with them. To learn more about the views held by Swedish Democrat members in 2021, I spoke to Maja Asterhag, the Young Swedish Democrats’ representative for Skåne.

As a Young Swedish Democrat, Maja represents the future generation of the party. The county she represents, Skåne, is the southernmost county in Sweden and the home county of the Swedish Democrats. It is also where they had their most success in the 2018 election, winning their highest proportion of votes in three constituencies in Skåne: Bjuv, Sjöbo and Bromölla with 38.7%, 39.4% and 38.3% of the vote respectively. In Skåne as a whole they won 23.4% of the vote, beating the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) by 2%. Maja credits this popularity to two factors: the fact that the party was founded in Skåne and its geographical location. The latter refers to Skåne’s southern position in regard to the refugee crisis. In 2016, Sweden took in 165,000 asylum seekers - more than any other European nation per capita. Since many of these refugees enter through Skåne, the county sees a larger and more rapid influx than in the northern areas of Sweden. She explains that because there are a higher proportion of immigrants in Skåne, support for hard-line anti-immigration parties like the Swedish Democrats has increased.

Speaking with Maja helped me build a picture of the current state of the Swedish Democrats. She explained to me that she sympathised and understood why people are sceptical of their change in stance on LGBT+ rights, but that she believed it made no difference whether she fell in love with a boy or a girl.

Of all the topics we discussed, it was her comments on abortion that were the most effective in convincing me of a major shift in the party dynamic. She explained that the youth party, the Young Swedish Democrats, had actually been responsible for convincing the party to change their stance on this; now they support the current abortion legislation where women are allowed to choose an abortion up to and including the 18th week of their pregnancies. This implies the youth party holds more progressive views than the mother party, and in turn indicates a more progressive future for the Swedish Democrats. I saw further evidence of this when discussing immigration, where Maja explained that she would never want to punish people for having to seek asylum, a pleasant contrast to Gunilla Schmidt’s joking comments I mentioned earlier, about shooting immigrants trying to enter Skåne.

Overall, I think it’s apparent that a significant effort has been put into moving the Swedish Democrats away from their extremist origins, however the Swedish public are more than entitled to call into question to motivations behind that effort: whether they are self-serving, superficial or genuine. They are also entitled to feel wary towards them, because ultimately, all the reform in the world cannot erase their history.