Sweden immigration minister Maria Malmer Stenergard’s comments on driving down immigration numbers would have been almost unimaginable ten years ago.
Sweden has seen a massive increase in immigration in the 2000s under governments of both left and right, a product of (take your pick) generosity, naïvety, and a self-congratulatory sense of mission (the belief, which has manifested itself in different ways over the years, that Sweden was a moral or, more modestly, humanitarian superpower) supplemented, under center-right governments between 2006-14, by a sort of libertarianism.
That “sort of” libertarianism did not extend to free speech, a notion that can be tricky to reconcile with the traditional Swedish fondness for consensus. Under the center-right prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, a politician as blinkered as he was arrogant, Sweden’s åsiktskorridor (“opinion corridor”), an idea not dissimilar to that of the Overton Window, saw the boundaries of “acceptable” political discussion narrowly drawn by the center right as well as by the left.
This left quite a few Swedes unhappy about the size and speed of immigration, with nowhere to turn other than the Sweden Democrats, a small rightist party with a very unsavory past that had slowly been cleaning itself up. In the 2010 election, the SD came (it seemed) from nowhere, passing the 4 percent threshold needed to get into parliament.
At the time, I wrote this:
For now, however, let’s just ponder the response of the Swedish political establishment to the vote, a carefully choreographed display of moral panic, buttressed by declarations that nobody serious will be talking to these upstarts, a display that may (judging by a number of conversations I have had today) have irritated a number of Swedes who would otherwise have had nothing to do with the new party.
Rather than pay attention to the message being sent by voters, Reinfeldt continued to preside over a recklessly relaxed immigration policy, while making no attempt to draw the SD into the democratic debate, a process that had worked well in Norway and Denmark as a device to encourage parties of the populist right to shed their extremists. On the contrary, he went to extraordinary lengths to do the opposite, but this ostracism, which was enforced across the political spectrum, confirmed the suspicion of a good many Swedes that no establishment party had any interest in listening to their concerns over immigration. The SD, however, did continue to clean itself up. It more than doubled its share of the vote (to 13 percent) in the 2014 elections. But the party still found itself on the wrong side of a cordon sanitaire, even after those elections, in which Reinfeldt’s party (the Moderates) had not unrelatedly lost power.
In 2015, a huge number of asylum seekers arrived in Sweden, in part thanks to Angela Merkel’s decision to fling open Germany’s doors. This propelled the SD to the top of the opinion polls. By the end of the year, the ruling center-left government introduced measures designed to ensure that Sweden moved away from its previous asylum regime, a move that the Moderates, by then with a new leader, said was not enough. The government took additional steps to restrict the inflow in 2016, and managed to survive a ridiculously close election in 2018, in which the SD received 17.5 percent of the votes.
The 2022 election brought the Moderates into power, despite losing some support. The center-left Social Democrats, Sweden’s largest party (and the dominant party in the outgoing coalition), gained votes, but the SD gained more, overtaking the Moderates and becoming Sweden’s second largest party. They now support a minority Moderate-led government, but from the outside (there was a similar arrangement in Denmark for years).
Mass immigration has changed Sweden irrevocably. About one-fifth of the population are foreign-born. Levels of violent crime have reached once unthinkable levels, The two facts are not unconnected.
Swedish police do not currently map gang members’ nationalities, but research for the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention in 2021 showed young people born in Sweden to two parents from abroad were overrepresented as suspects in murder cases and robberies.
And, as the rise of the SD shows, it has also changed Sweden’s politics. Comments such as these reported in the Daily Telegraph today by Sweden’s immigration minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, a Moderate, would have been almost unimaginable ten years ago:
Sweden must drive down immigration and improve integration to tackle its drug gangs problem, the minister responsible for cutting asylum seeker numbers to the lowest since 1997 has said.
The country now has more emigrants than immigrants for the first time in 50 years after toughening asylum rules since a conservative-led coalition took power in 2022.
Maria Malmer Stenergard, the minister for migration, blamed large-scale immigration and poor integration for a string of social issues, including the violent crime epidemic that has tarnished the Scandinavian country’s once peaceful image.
“Large-scale immigration, combined with a lack of efficient integration, has led to widespread social exclusion, with many people suffering as a result. This includes overcrowded housing, poor educational outcomes, honour-related oppression, and crime,” said Ms Malmer Stenergard.
This year, police warned that 62,000 people are linked to gangs in Sweden, which now has the highest gun-crime death rate in the EU and has witnessed bombings and shootings spread to the suburbs from its cities.
Ms Malmer Stenergard said: “Unfortunately, we observe higher crime rates among those born abroad and second-generation immigrants. We want to take responsibility for the shortcomings in integration. However, we cannot do so if high levels of immigration continue.”
The government, she said, “had much work to do.”
Ten years ago, then-prime minister Reinfeldt dismissed concerns about mass immigration in these terms:
What does the word “enough” mean? Sweden is full? The Nordic region is full? Are we too many people? We are 25 million people living in the North. I often fly over the Swedish countryside and I would advise others to do. There are endless fields and forests. There’s more space than you might imagine. Those who claim that the country is full, they should demonstrate where it is full.
Those words are yet another reminder that, although extremism can undeniably be found in the fringes of left and right, those are not the only places where it lurks.
(Note: Amended to correct the threshold required for entry into the Swedish parliament from 5 percent to 4 percent).