In advance of the Swedish general election, the New York Times carried the alarmist headline: “How the far right conquered Sweden.” The far right has not conquered Sweden. Nor is it going to. Three years after the country accepted a huge number of Syrian refugees (it received 162,877 asylum applications – equivalent to around a million in Britain) the leading anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), raised its share of the vote by five points (to 17.6 per cent) in the 9 September general election and finished third (behind the incumbent Social Democrats and the centre-right Moderate Party).
It still won’t have a place in government, although it may determine which of the more respectable parties can form an administration. Yet this is a much smaller backlash than one might expect in Britain or other EU member states.
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