Sweden swings pro-White
The anti-immigration, pro-White Sweden Democrats are now the country’s most popular party, according to a poll published Thursday.
Pollster YouGov put the party’s support at 25.2 percent, ahead of 23.4 percent for the governing Social Democrats and 21 percent for the center-right Moderates.
However, YouGov’s method of polling 1,527 participants chosen from an internet panel of volunteers came in for criticism. Swedish Radio News said such panels are often over-representative of young men, while overlooking the elderly and poorly educated.
A different poll conducted in June for Swedish Radio News put support for the Sweden Democrats at 16.4 percent.
Some analysts also attributed the strong poll result to “special circumstances” after an Eritrean migrant confessed to stabbing two people to death outside an IKEA store in Sweden earlier this month.
Responding to the YouGov poll, a party spokesman told reporters it was “a historic day … We are many who have fought for years to reach this point and now we are here.”
While seeking to move the party away from its neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats’ charismatic leader Jimmie Åkesson advocates cutting Sweden’s migrant intake by 90 percent, and has criticized Muslim immigrants for segregating around Swedish cities in “parallel societies.”
In parliamentary elections last September the Sweden Democrats won 12.9 percent of the vote — up from 5.7 percent in 2010 — to become the third-largest political party.
Many migrants were appalled by the election result, with some going to work the next day dressed in black as an act of mourning. One man told Al-Jazeera he would return to Africa with his family, saying, “I want my children to feel like first-class citizens. It’s sad but it feels like no matter how well you speak Swedish, and how many degrees and jobs you have, you will always be seen as the black girl with a scarf.”
Sweden receives the most asylum seekers per capita of any EU nation, though the Swedish Migration Board last month predicted it would receive 74,000 people this year, down from about 80,000 taken in last year and the 90,000 it initially predicted for 2015 in February.
