When Sweden holds its general election on Sunday, 13 September, it will be a showdown between the populist right-wing Sweden Democrats (SD) and the rest, especially the left-centre parties, with the Social Democrats as the largest party. The Conservative Party (M), or the Moderates, as it is called, currently has the PM, Ulf Kristersson (62), leading a coalition government, with support from SD, which, however, does not have seats in the Cabinet since it was not seen to be mainstream and democratic enough after the election four years ago. This time around, though, SD has made it clear that it will not support M unless it is also included in the Cabinet, which the M chair and PM has agreed to. After all, SD is the country’s second-largest party and will probably get more seats in parliament than M; recent opinion polls show some 18-19 percent support for SD and some 17 percent support for M, with smaller parties in the centre. S, on the other side of the bloc divide, has for long been around 30 percent in opinion polls, but is declining.

A major problem with SD is that when it was founded in 1988, it was an extreme right-wing party for people who were strongly anti-immigrant, especially against Muslims, and it also had neo-Nazi members and sympathisers. Later, it tried to clean up its past and make the party more mainstream and acceptable to broader voter groups and to the other conservative parties it has to cooperate with in order to be part of a coalition government.

SD’s chairman for more than 21 years, Jimmie Åkesson (47), tries to distance himself from the extremists, although sometimes he, too, makes statements and expresses opinions that are quite extreme. Recently, there was a major stir when Richard Jomshof (57), a prominent SD member of parliament since 2010, claimed that S and other parties on the left are ‘appeasing the Islamists’.

Yet, it is a fact that Sweden has, in recent decades, been very open to allowing high numbers of immigrants and refugees to enter the country, and now over 20........

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