Very clever whoever dares to predict the outcome of the legislative elections, Sunday, September 11, in Sweden. For weeks, all the polls have been pointing in the same direction: the results promise to be very tight, to the point that a repeat of the 2018 elections is already looming. It then took four months for the outgoing Prime Minister, the Social Democrat Stefan Löfven, to obtain the confidence of the deputies.
In the meantime, a party is already largely victorious in this unprecedented campaign. Founded by former fascists in 1988, the Democrats of Sweden (SD) party is credited with a second position, behind the Social Democrats, with more than 20% of voting intentions (against 17.5% in 2018) . But the far-right formation, led by Jimmie Akesson, finds itself at the gates of power, demonized by the liberal conservative right, ready to make it its back-up force in Parliament to ensure its return to government, after eight years in the government. ‘opposition.
Four years ago, however, the SD were still considered plague victims. Asked in June 2018 about a possible rapprochement with the far-right party, the boss of the Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch Thor, replied that she did not see such a “development happen” in the next twenty years. In a revealing slip, the same Ebba Busch Thor qualified, at the beginning of September, the SDs of “blue party” : a qualifier reserved for the traditional right.
“They hardly dare to contradict them”
Has Jimmie Akesson’s party undergone a transformation in recent years that has suddenly made it popular? Professor at Stockholm University, sociologist Jens Rydgren believes that “it is rather the other parties that have changed and come closer to the positions of the Democrats of Sweden”. “They not only imitate the rhetoric of the SD, but also take up their definitions of the problems and the solutions they propose”abounds researcher Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a specialist in the far right, at the University of Södertörn.
“This even concerns the Social Democrats, who have a much more restrictive migration policy than before”, remarks Mr. Rydgren. A shift that was accompanied by a cautious restraint towards the Democrats of Sweden, on the part of the right-wing parties, observes the sociologist: “No matter the scandals, they remain silent and no longer criticize. They hardly dare to contradict them. »
For his part, Jimmie Akesson, aged 43, at the head of the party since 2005, spares no effort to demonstrate that his party has definitively broken with its roots in the neo-Nazi movement. The party even hired a historian to write a white paper on its history, a way to show that it has nothing to hide.
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