Is Sweden taking a page out of the MAGA handbook?

Liberty News: Swedes flocked to the voting booths September 9, and the results were as expected: Chaotic. The establishment parties on both the left and the right experienced major losses to the populist anti-immigration wildcard Sweden Democrats (SD), thereby preventing any traditional majority coalition.

The ruling Social Democrats (S) crashed at 28.4%, their worst election result in more than a century. The conservative Moderates (M) also hemorrhaged voters and ended on 19.8%, but both parties expressed joy and relief that the losses weren’t even greater.

SD had polled between 15% and 25% before the election and eventually clocked in at 17.6%. Although this is far lower than many people hoped – or feared – it is still by far the best result in their short history, and they will surely manage to create havoc.

Rejected by the State

Before the election, the Sweden Democrats were the centerpiece of a major media scandal. In a televised party leader debate on Sweden’s state channel SVT, SD’s leader Jimmy Åkesson stated that the reason so many immigrants are struggling to find a job is because they don’t fit into Sweden. Immigrants need to integrate and become more like Swedes, he said. This led SVT to officially condemn the statement as “too generalizing.”

The unprecedented interference by a taxpayer-financed public broadcaster in an election, led to major reactions in Sweden as well as in the neighboring Scandinavian countries.

How this scandal affected the outcome of the election is unclear, but it demonstrated the totalitarian impulse of the Swedish ruling class.

What’s Next?

Both the left and the right are behaving as if SD doesn’t exist.  more