The usual head scratching is taking place among the bien-pensants as to why the Swedish anti-immigrant party took more seats in the recent election. Look at the figures.
Jimmie Akesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, has a simple explanation for the lack of jobs. “If you allow more asylum seekers into the country than the number of jobs you can create, the result is obvious,” he said in a recent speech. Sweden expects more than 90,000 asylum seekers this year, a huge number in a county of only 10 million people. According to the United Nations, Sweden received the most asylum applications per person in the world from 2009 through 2013. The share of Swedes born abroad was 16 percent last year compared with 11 percent in 2000. Akesson calls for cutting back on asylum acceptances, requiring immigrants to pass language tests, and trimming immigrants’ welfare benefits.
“The Sweden Democrats is the only political party that wants to stop immigration,” Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Lund University, told the French news agency AFP. “All the other political parties have a united stance, a generous immigration policy.”
1. Why are the Nordic nations so keen on erasing their national existence?
2. Why do their policy elites believe that unlimited immigration of Muslims, Africans and every sort of refugee claimant should take place?
3. Why, when one out six people in Sweden is not Swedish by culture or assimilation, do they believe their culture will survive, at current rates of immigration?
The usual suspects, such as the Economist, see the election as shift to the Left after a decade of conservative retrenchment. Bloomberg reports on potential parliamentary deadlock.
The only real winner is the party that is resisting the tide of immigration, the Sweden democrats, with which all other parties have pledged not to cooperate.
The results for the Sweden Democrats are shown in the yellow bar.
Fraser Nelson, in the Spectator, captured the issue.
As for the other parties – they concentrated too much on denouncing the Sweden Democrats and not enough on addressing the concerns of their target voters. As one TV commentator put it, it’s all very well bemoaning racism but if a voter’s school suddenly takes in 100 kids who don’t speak Swedish then they’re going to have concerns. Who’s listening? In a lot of cases, the answer was the Sweden Democrats.
The usual charges of racism attend any attempt by any organized political movement to stop the drowning of local populations in Muslims, whatever the political stripe of the resisting party: moderate liberal (UKIP-Nigel Farage), hard line (Front National -Marine Le Pen), fascist (Hungary-Jobbik ). It matters not what the economic policies are of the resisting parties; their are branded as racist for resisting the policies chosen by their national elites. That is their common denominator. In a sane world UKIP and Marine Le Pen’s political group would be perceived as distinctly as Liberals and Tories are in Canada, but in the prevailing elite view that drowning Europeans in Islamic rabble is good for you, all resistance is “racist” and the same. On the contrary, resistance is channeled through significant variations in local political culture.
The fact that any resistance to immigration on this scale exists at all is what makes European elites so outraged.
A report from 2013 from the BBC on rioting in Sweden shows that the usual suspects are Muslims burning cars. The issue is described as “inequality”, and strident denials of the Islamic origin of the rioting assure one that the issue is exactly what it is denied to be: mass Islamic immigration
The BBC report has all the hallmarks of denial:
There was a widespread assertion that the violence was not motivated by Islamist ideology.
Despite the assertion, some local people said the police had been heavy-handed and there is clearly much anger at the shooting dead by police of an elderly man wielding a knife 10 days ago.
Many said there was a wider context of a growing gap between rich and poor in Sweden.
On OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) figures, Sweden has seen the biggest increase in inequality of any developed country over the past 25 years.
Immigrants and their descendants tend to congregate in areas such as Husby, the neighbourhood west of Stockholm where the violence started on Sunday.
About 80% of the 11,000 residents are either first- or second-generation immigrants.
Accordingly, this week’s troubles have raised the volume of the debate in Sweden on immigration. About 15% of the population was born outside the country, the highest proportion in any of the Nordic countries.
The influx has come mostly from war-torn countries like Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Syria. In 2012, Sweden accepted 44,000 asylum seekers, up by nearly 50% from a year earlier.
Ah! The total mystery of it all! The inexplicable relationship between massive influx of low-skilled Islamic immigrants, poor assimilation, higher incidences of rape, and cars burning in the night.