Dealing with the
right-wing populist challenge
by Sheri Berman on 12th
April 2021
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Sheri Berman explores what the
Swedish case reveals about strategies to adopt towards right-wing populist
parties.
Sheri Berman
The 2018 Swedish election was a
watershed. The incumbent left-wing government, led by the Social Democrats
(SAP) in alliance with the Green party (MP) and supported by the
left-socialists (V), won one more seat than the alliance of the traditional
parties of the right—conservative Moderates (M), Liberals (L), Centre party (C)
and Christian Democrats (KD)—but fell far short of a majority. The largest
parties of the left and right, the SAP and M, had terrible elections, with the
former receiving less than 30 per cent of the vote, its lowest vote share since
1911, and the latter less than 20 per cent.
Voters shifted from both parties to the populist-right Sweden
Democrats (SD), which received 17.5 per cent of the vote. This was its largest
share ever—large enough to ensure that a right-wing majority government could
not be formed without its support.
After four months of negotiations, a
landmark agreement which split the traditional left- and right-wing blocs in
Swedish politics—the so-called January agreement (Januariavtalet)—was
finally reached. This enabled the SAP’s Stefan Löfven to return as prime
minister, having struck bargains with other left parties as well as the Liberal
and Centre parties.
The new SAP-Green government had,
however, only 116 seats in parliament, out of the 175 needed for a majority. It
was burdened from the outset by the substantial concessions it had to make to
the Liberal and Centre parties to get them to break with their traditional
alliance partners and commit to not voting against the new government.
Vociferous debate
The weakness of the government which
emerged from the 2018 elections is compounded by the sustained strength of the
SD: polls show the party continues to enjoy
the backing of nearly one in five voters. This has generated a vociferous
debate about how to deal with the SD and create stable majority governments
capable of dealing with the country’s problems. Since such issues are being debated
across Europe, it is worth looking at the evolution of the Swedish debate more
closely.
Until the last election, all the
mainstream Swedish parties adopted a ‘dismissive’ strategy towards the SD. Most
obviously, this entailed an unwillingness to work with the party during election
campaigns or when forming governments. But the mainstream parties’ dismissal of
the SD went beyond a refusal to co-operate with the party. Until relatively
recently, mainstream parties ignored or downplayed many of the concerns on
which, as with other right-wing populist parties, the SD thrived: immigration,
assimilation, ‘law and order’ and so on.
Bo Rothstein and Sven Steinmo noted in Social Europe, for
example, that while Sweden had experienced a greater influx of migrants and
refugees than at any point in its modern history or proportionately than in any
other European country and ‘popular opinion polls indicated significant
dissatisfaction with these policies’, all established parties, even the M, had
supported the ‘open door’:
Anyone who questioned this policy—from
within the established parties, the media, or academia—was instantly tagged as
reprobate or racist and pushed to one side. Swedish voters who wanted a
somewhat more moderate refugee policy (perhaps something like that followed in
Norway or Denmark) had no party to turn to—except the Sweden Democrats.
However morally satisfying and
normatively desirable the dismissive strategy might be, the continued
popularity of the SD made clear that it did not work. Why?
Salient and distinctive
Scholars generally find that convergence between mainstream parties is
associated with the rise of radical parties, because it waters
down the profile of the former and gives voters looking for alternatives
nowhere to turn. This dynamic is particularly pronounced when mainstream
parties converge on positions far from that of a significant number of voters.
This, of course, is precisely what happened in Sweden and elsewhere.
The rise of the SD was not driven
primarily by a shift in citizens’ preferences, with voters becoming, for example,
more racist or xenophobic—indeed in Sweden, as in many other European
countries, just the opposite was the case. Rather, the SD
were given the opportunity to capture the support of many voters because
mainstream parties did not offer voters with moderate to conservative positions
on immigration a place to turn.
As with other radical or niche
parties, right-wing populists thrive, in short, when they can emphasise issues
that are salient to voters (as immigration became to voters in
Sweden and other European countries over the past years) and offer positions on
them that are attractive and distinctive (approximating the
preferences of many voters and differing from what other parties offer).
By 2018 the failure of the
dismissive strategy in Sweden was evident. After the election the conservative
and Christian-democrat parties began openly shifting towards what might be
called an ‘accommodative’ strategy, indicating they would consider co-operating
with the SD to make possible the formation of a right-wing government in 2022.
Perhaps more surprising, the Liberal party—which has a more ‘centrist’ profile
than the M and KD and took, as noted above, the unprecedented step of breaking
with its traditional allies after the 2018 election precisely to shut the SD
out of power—recently voted to shift course too. Can an accommodative strategy
succeed?
Underlying conditions
Such a strategy can only work if it
addresses the underlying conditions which enable right-wing populists such as
the SD to prosper. The first is distinctiveness. Wooing voters away from the SD
requires offering voters with concerns about immigration and related issues a
moderate to conservative alternative to the racist and xenophobic rhetoric and
policies peddled by the party. This is what the M and KD have been doing,
particularly since the 2018 election.
This shift is necessary, but
probably not sufficient. Partly this is because in Sweden, as in many other
European countries, populist parties have been around long enough to ‘own’ the
immigration issue: they are seen by voters as having the most consistent and
reliable positions on it. Citizens voting on the basis of concerns about
immigration may, accordingly, prefer the ‘real’ thing over parties of the right
which have only recently shifted course.
The second condition therefore which
needs to be addressed to deal with right-wing populism is salience. Since
anxieties about immigration drive support for the SD and other right-wing
populist parties, as long as immigration remains central to political debate
and competition such parties will flourish.
Undercutting support for these
parties over the long-term requires, accordingly, diminishing the salience of
immigration. Over the past years in-migration in Sweden and other European
countries has dropped but concerns about labour-market inclusion, integration,
crime and ‘terrorism’ remain. Dealing forthrightly and effectively with these
concerns would diminish their importance or salience to voters, enabling them
to turn their attention to issues on which the SD, as with other populist
parties, lack distinctive positions.
This article is a joint publication
by Social
Europe and IPS-Journal
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