The Guardian view on the Swedish elections

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/15/guardian-view-on-swedish-elections

Version 0 of 1.

The result of the Swedish general election must be deeply disappointing for the left. After eight years in opposition to a government that seemed determined to attack public spending and privatise as much as possible of the welfare state, the Social Democrats will form the next government – but with less than 0.5% more of the popular vote than their worst-ever election performance last time. Their prospective coalition partners, the Greens and the Left party, did no better. All of the action was on the right, where the xenophobic and reactionary Sweden Democrats more than doubled their share of the vote at the expense of the internationalist and technocratic Moderate party. The right wing that marches under a flag triumphed over the right wing that governs from its spreadsheets.

There is a lot to dislike about the Sweden Democrats. The party has its roots in a neo-Nazi movement. Its policies are incoherent, apart from a steady hostility to immigrants and cosmopolitans. Many candidates are tainted with thuggery and racism. Yet the agreement reached by all the other parties to ignore them in the hope that they will go away has failed. Exclusion from power has merely strengthened the Sweden Democrats’ claim to be the party of the outsiders. A similar policy pursued by the mainstream parties in Finland led to the nationalist and reactionary True Finns rising from nowhere to 20% of the vote in the first decade of this century.

The Sweden Democrats are part of a wider wave of romantic and nostalgic nativism around the world. They have much in common with the successful xenophobic and populist parties in Denmark and Norway and something in common with Ukip in this country, and even the Tea Party in the US. All these are movements against the elites, motivated in part by an anger against establishment snobbery even if most of their rage is directed at foreigners and immigrants. The Sweden Democrats are a party for people who will never be fashionable and who live in places at which the metropolitan elite will always sneer. In this, too, they resemble Ukip. If Clacton were in Sweden, it would vote Sweden Democrat.

The difficulty for the left is to produce a narrative of optimism and emotion that is anchored in everyday life and that can compete with this populist despair and sense of outraged dignity. Economic competence on its own will not be enough. The Swedish centre-right could claim success in navigating the crash of 2008 better than almost any other country. Denmark and Norway combine great wealth with hostility to immigrants. The internationalist centre-left must have a vision of a life that is richer and not merely more prosperous than that of the nationalist right.