Sweden's Far-Right Suffers Historic Setback as Voters in Multicultural Neighborhoods Push Back

Sumeyah Ali says young people in her multicultural neighbourhood are protesting with their vote. In Stockholm, Sweden, Jimmie Akesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), cast his early ballot in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb where most residents have a minority background. “It was a political stunt,” said 18-year-old Sumeyah Ali. “It was meant to provoke.”

After voting, Akesson told reporters Rinkeby “doesn’t look like Sweden … Sweden shouldn’t look like this, I think.” His provocative comments were designed to fuel the party’s anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric, said Ali at an office space for Jarva i samverkan, a Stockholm-based network of local nonprofits that coordinates free activities and youth programmes. But his apparent bid failed.

Although the overall general election is too close to call, one result is clear: the SD suffered its first-ever decline in a parliamentary election, falling three percentage points to 17.5 percent and slipping from second to third place behind the Moderate Party.

The party, which has neo-Nazi roots, has repeatedly targeted Islam. In 2023, Akesson called for a halt to new mosques and said Sweden should, in the longer term, begin “seizing and demolishing mosques” that spread “anti-democratic, anti-Swedish” propaganda, a proposal rejected by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Akesson has said he targets Islamism, not Muslims, but senior SD MP Richard Jomshof abandoned that distinction during the campaign. When asked by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter in August what message he had for Muslims living peacefully in Sweden, he replied: “They can stop being Muslims, for a start.”

Zack, a 27-year-old resident, told Al Jazeera that many have grown thicker skin in response to the SD, which has also proposed banning the hijab and intimidated people with posters reading “We make Sweden, Sweden again”. “It was rage-bait, but it didn’t work,” said Sara, a 25-year-old business owner. She recalled when Rasmus Paludan, the Danish-Swedish far-right politician, burned a Quran in Rinkeby Square in 2022. Riots, as well as peaceful protests, took over several Swedish cities. “It was chaos then, but people know now we can’t be provoked, as that is what they want,” she said.

For the SD, once considered a political pariah, this election signalled an opportunity to capitalise on two decades of steady growth and enter government with the right-wing bloc that includes the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. By the early hours of Monday, preliminary results gave Sweden’s centre-left opposition bloc a razor-thin lead of 176 seats to 173 over Kristersson’s right-wing alliance.

Voter turnout largely rose in multicultural areas like Rinkeby, but fell across the country overall. Stockholm City has launched Fokus Jarva, a project that aims to close the gap in conditions between the district and the rest of the city, with plans for some 15,000 new homes alongside upgrades to schools, services, jobs, safety and public spaces.