Sweden’s first female prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, announced that she would step down after her government was defeated in the elections. Sweden Democrats, a political party that emerged from the neo-Nazi movement, became the second party in the country. They represent distinctly conservative positions on gender issues relative to Swedish norms and the political consensus on gender equality.
Magdalena Andersson’s centre-left bloc lost narrowly to a bloc of right-wing parties, 176 seats to 173, with 99% of the votes counted. Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats had governed Sweden since 2014 and dominated the country’s political landscape since the 1930s.
She has been edged out by a four-party right-wing block made up of the Sweden Democrats, Moderate Party, Christian Democrats and Liberals.
As a result of the elections, the extreme right-wing party Sweden Democrats (SD), which emerged from the neo-Nazi movement, increased its vote by three points compared to the 2018 elections, and became the second party in the country.
In 2015, with the increasing influx of immigration to Europe, concerns about immigrants increased in the country and a rapid increase was observed in the SD’s votes. The party opposes immigration from countries outside of Europe.
However the party’s leader Jimmie Akesson will not become prime minister, because he does not have the support of the other right-wing parties to take on the job. Instead, Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderates has said he will start work to form a government.
Ms Andersson was the Nordic nation’s first female PM when she took office last year – she quit on the first day, before returning soon after.
Rise of the right-wing in Sweden
It is a momentous turning point for Swedish politics – the Sweden Democrats was once treated as a pariah by political parties, but has now won around 20% of the vote.
In 2005, current party leader Jimmie Akesson came to head the group. Only 26 at the time, the former member of the Moderate party pushed the Sweden Democrat’s image away from its far-right roots, taking it in more of a populist direction.
Johan Martinsson, a political science professor at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg., defines the Sweden Democrats as “mainly an anti-immigration party with a nationalist ideology” but shies away from describing it as extreme- or radical-right.
As the the close-fought election campaign was dominated by gangs, immigration and integration issues, as well as soaring electricity prices, promising “make Sweden safe again” by bringing in longer prison sentences and restricting immigration had great influence on their success in these elections.
Paralleling other right-populist movements, the party sought to portray itself as “advocating for ‘ordinary people’ against a corrupt elite at the height of a global recession,” writes scholar Danielle Lee Tomson in a paper on the rise of the Sweden Democrats.
What does the rise of the far right mean for women’s rights?
Sweden Democrats represent distinctly conservative positions on gender issues relative to Swedish norms and the political consensus on gender equality.
As with comparable parties in other West European democracies, the Sweden Democrats argue that gender equality is a national trait of Sweden. Therefore, they say, it needs to be protected from the alleged threat of (mostly Muslim) immigration. In this discourse, the protection of women’s rights becomes an argument to oppose immigration, which is associated with, for instance, honour crimes.
This argument constitutes the party’s most prominent discourse on gender equality. It covers up the Sweden Democrats’ silence on feminist issues and its relatively conservative stances on, for example, family policy. Like other West European radical-right parties, the Sweden Democrats generally hold conservative positions on gender issues. The exception is when they can use progressive positions to construct a gender-equal national identity and oppose immigration.
Sources: BBC, DW, European Consortium for Political Research