Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

Sweden 147
other RRP parties (Johansson, 2002: 5). Like most of these parties, the
Sweden Democrats is a pronounced culturalist party, whose programme is
based on ethno-nationalism and xenophobia. Like other populist parties, it
also makes frequent recourse to an anti-Establishment strategy.
If we look at the party’s 2002 manifesto, we find that its primary stated
political goal is ‘to defend our national identity’ (Sverigedemokraterna, 2002
on line). This ambition rests upon an ontological relationship with the
terms ‘people’ and ‘culture’ (that is, to the notion that each nation embodies
one ethnically determined culture) and a nostalgic belief in ‘the myth
of the golden past’ (Rydgren, 2003b), a yearning for an imagined gemeinschaft
free from conflict and social problems. This philosophy thus treats
cultures as unique, yet fragile, and when different cultures come together
in one and the same state, the integrity of the unique, dominant national
identity is therefore jeopardized. Consequently, the Sweden Democrats
advocate ethnic segregation. In the words of the former party secretary,
Torbjörn Kastell, the party wants ‘a multicultural world, not a multicultural
society’ (2002: 130).
According to the Sweden Democrats, immigration, supranationality (such
as the EU), cultural imperialism (mainly from the USA) and globalization
(they also want a check on economic globalism) were the greatest threats to
the unique Swedish culture and by far their greatest concern was immigration.
Consequently, the party advocates a highly restrictive immigration
policy that effectively denies access to all non-Europeans and imposes a
citizenship condition of 10 years’ residency and knowledge of Swedish language
and history.
As with other RRP parties, the Sweden Democrats’ discourse on immigration
and immigrants is constructed around four separate themes: first, as we
saw above, immigration is considered a threat to Swedish culture and
national identity. Second, immigration is considered to be at the root of
crime and, in particular, offences of a violent or sexual nature. Hence, the
Sweden Democrats’ official journal SD-kuriren’s website has regularly published
accounts of crimes committed by people with immigrant backgrounds
in an attempt to promote an image of immigrants as the main cause of
criminality.
Third and fourth, immigration is seen as a cause of unemployment and of
the financial constraints and problems of the Welfare State. Immigrants are
generally depicted as illegitimately competing for scant resources, which in
the rhetoric of the Sweden Democrats should go to ‘ethnic Swedes.’ Like the
French Front National, the Sweden Democrats have promulgated the principle
of ‘national preference’, by which they mean that ‘Swedes’ are to be given
priority access to childcare, jobs and healthcare. This strategy is conducted
under the motto of ‘Swedes first!’, a highly potent slogan that plays on jealousy
and identifies a convenient scapegoat for the problems faced by many
people in their everyday lives.