Sweden's election Sunday, the far right, and the struggling center

Sweden had a national election Sunday. The press coverage in Europe and America was focused largely on how well the far-right, xenophobic Sweden Democrats would do.

This Spiegel Online count (Wahl in Schweden 2018: Ergebnisse im Überblick 09.09.2018) breaks the results down this way (rounded here):

Social Democrats 28%
Moderates (a centrist party) 20%
Sweden Democrats 18%
Center Party (liberal in European sense) 9%
Left Party 8%
Christian Democrats 6%
Liberals (in European sense) 6%
Greens 4%
Other 1%

Polls had been showing a potential for as much as a 25% vote for the Sweden Democrats. So even though the party gained significantly over the previous election, it didn't achieve what for democracy supporters would have been the worse scendario of 25%.

It's dilemma enough as it is.

Sweden's current government headed by Prime Minister Stefan Lofven is a coalition of Lofven's Social Democratic party with the Greens, tolerated by the Left Party, which means the Left Party doesn't vote to change the governing coalition but is not a coalition partner and doesn't get ministries.

Nick Rigillo and Amanda Billner run through various post-election coalition options in , A Guide to Sweden’s Next Government After Its Inconclusive Election Bloomberg News 09/108/2018.

It's particularly notable that the two largest vote-getters in the election, the center-left Social Democrats and the center-right Moderates, did not win enough seats to be able to form a majority government by themselves.

Marco Giuli makes an important point.

Would appreciate to see it reported this way: in EU country with largest number of refugees per capita, 82% of voters did NOT vote for far-right nativists #SwedenElection #VAL2018

— Marco Giuli (@MarcoGiuli) September 9, 2018

In the 2015/early-2016 surge in immigrants and refugees into Europe, Germany famously accepted the largest number. But per capita relative to population, Sweden accepted the most, Austria second, and Germany third.

As I dig into immigration statistics in Europe, I've become more aware of the different ways refugee numbers can be parsed. I assume that Giuli is referring to net number of refugees. The numbers can also be parsed by gross numbers of immigrants. There is also a difference among the various concepts of refugees, political refugees, asylum seekers, economic refugees, and immigrants. The xenophobic groups in Austria and Germany prefer to talk about "migrants", to minimize the amount of distress from war and climate change that drives current immigration into Europe. "Migration" invokes less of an image of desperation than, say, "people fleeing for their lives beause they were about to get murdered in a civil war because of their religion."

One of the things that polls in Germany, Austria, and the United States show repeatedly is that people who live in areas where there are immigrants present in significant numbers and people who have personal contact with immigrants are less likely to support anti-immigrant parties than those who do not. There is a strong inverse relationship, in other words, between familiarity with living breathing immigrants and support for anti-immigrant parties and policies.

As imporant as it is to recognize the limited nature of the Sweden Democrats' win Sunday, it doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems for the established parties going forward. Jon Henley discusses this in Real story of Sweden's election is not about march of the far right Guardian 09/10/2018:

The real story of Sweden’s election is not, as the prevailing narrative has it, the irresistible onward march of Europe’s far right but the continuing decline of the major parties of government, the fragmentation of national votes and the rise of a number of smaller parties.

In a trend visible across Europe, the electoral base of the leading mainstream parties is shrinking. “The bigger parties are getting smaller and the smaller parties getting bigger,” said Sarah de Lange, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam and a specialist in Europe’s radical right.

Across the continent, mainstream parties and alliances that once dominated national politics are in retreat, most notably on the left, making coalition-forming harder – even in countries, like Sweden, long used to coalition government – and producing weaker, potentially shorter-lived governments.

The neoliberal economic and social paradigm that both center-left and center-right parties have embraced over the past two decades and more, the Reagan-Thatcher notion of TINA, i.e., There Is No Alternative to pro-corporate and anti-labor policies, has failed in many ways. The EU's brutal and reactionary handling of the Greek debt crisis is probably the single most dramatic example.

I would argue that the failure of this model is also seen in the inability of the EU to achieve a practical and humane collective policy to address the chronic immigration crisis that has been here since at least 2011.

Since it was the traditional base of the center-left parties that have been the most obviously hurt by neoliberal failures, those parties have shown their loss of voter support more than the center-right in the last 15 years. But the trend is hitting the center-right parties, as well. As Henley notes of Sunday's election in Sweden, "the big established parties of the centre-left and centre-right, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, lost 6.3 points between them."