The town of Falun — with its cobblestoned square, red brick church and white plastered town hall — is a Swedish picture postcard.
Three hours northwest of Stockholm, the town is best known for its distinctive “Falu” red paint, a byproduct of local copper mining, that is slathered on countless Swedish summer cottages.
With 10 days to Sweden’s general election, as locals peruse political parties’ colourful stands and badges, campaigners cast anxious glances at the opposite corner of the square. A stage is being erected by the populist Sweden Democrats (SD) for the imminent arrival of party leader, Jimmie Åkesson.
Since the 43-year-old took over in 2005 his far-right populist party has moved mainstream with a nationalist conservative programme. Support has risen from 5.7 per cent a decade ago to nearly 20 per cent.
While Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic Party are still leading on 29.8 per cent, the SD has overtaken the centre-right Moderaten for second place.
Amid energy and inflation fears, and Russia’s war in Ukraine still in the background, law and order is this campaign’s defining issue. Already this year Sweden has marked 44 fatal shootings and is likely to overtake the 2020 record of 47. With many shootings, stabbings and rapes linked to immigrant gangs and drug turf wars, rattled Swedish voters are more open than before to SD politics.
On Wednesday Åkesson presented voters with a “zero immigration plan” plan, promising tighter asylum rules and procedures to end “useless migration policies” and end open access to Sweden’s welfare system.
In Falun on Thursday he attracts cheers for suggesting that Sweden, with its liberal immigration policy, is “trying to save the world but the only thing we’re doing is getting poorer”.
“We are suffering,” he shouts. “More than 10 per cent of taxpayers’ contributions go to immigrants.”
For years such remarks were attacked as racist and xenophobic by political rivals. But since a mother and her child were shot in a playground last week, SD supporters are struggling not to say “I told you so”.
For Arrid Jaans, a blue-jacketed SD organiser in Falun, his party’s surge is because Swedes are now ready to see links between violent attacks, over-representation of people with immigrant backgrounds and decades of failed integration.
“Just like cigarette companies insisted for years that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, despite evidence, Sweden’s other political parties have been in denial about the risks of high immigration,” says Arrid. “It brings me no joy to say we were right, I’d prefer to be wrong, I want change.”
The shock — and hardening public mood — has seen even the ruling Social Democratic prime minister Magdalena Andersson shatter a taboo and link gangland crime to ethnicity: “Too much migration and too little integration have led to parallel societies where criminal gangs could take root and grow.”
Her ministers have promised to cap “non-Nordic” immigration and limit foreign national population in areas to 30 per cent by 2050.
While other parties play catchup, a warm-up SD party song on the Falun stage reminds the audience how “the toil of our fathers gave us security” and how the Sweden Democrats will “raise our voice and pay tribute to the heritage to which you turned a blind eye”.
Listening with glistening eyes is Jan, a 66 year-old local man who says his SD affiliation cost him his town hall job two years ago.
“The Sweden Democrats are the only party who recognised the problem of too many people coming, it’s too much,” he said, hoping Sweden will close its doors to migrants and asylum seekers. “It takes time to change the system but Jimmie is young, he can wait. In four years, he will take power.”
Usually an energetic and assured speaker, Åkesson stumbles and appears distracted in Falun. Small wonder: hours earlier, an official in his parliamentary party sent 30 colleagues a fika invitation — for coffee and cardamom buns — to “celebrate” the 83rd anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.
When the invitation leaked, SD officials, in damage-limitation mode, insisted this was an innocent offer by a Polish-born party employee. Political rivals denounced the “tasteless, shameful and offensive” — and, for them, timely — reminder of the SD’s neo-Nazi and fascist roots.
A week to polling day, Sweden’s centre-left party bloc who back Andersson have 49.7 per cent while four parties with 48.9 per cent support back Ulf Kristersson, of the centre-right Moderaten party to be the next prime minister.
Packing up the Moderaten election stand in Falun, 19-year-old Hendrik Larsson admits his party’s dilemma: its only path to power involves accepting political support from the SD.
“The difference is that we want to solve these migration and crime problems while the SD instrumentalise them to divide people,” says Hendrik, a Swede of Ukrainian descent who lost family members in Nazi death camps. “If the Moderaten even think of ruling with the SD, though, I’m out of here.”
