Sweden Democrats
The Sweden Democrats is a nationalist and right-wing populist political party in Sweden founded in 1988. As of 2024, it is the largest member of Sweden's right-wing bloc and the second-largest party in the Riksdag. It provides confidence and supply to the right-wing ruling coalition. Within the European Union, the party is a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party.
The party describes itself as social conservative with a nationalist foundation. The party has also been variously characterised by universities, political commentators, and international media as economic nationalist, national-conservative, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-gender, Eurosceptic, and right-wing or far-right. The Sweden Democrats reject the far-right label, saying that it no longer represents its political beliefs. Among the party's founders and early members were several people that had previously been active in white nationalist and neo-Nazi political parties and organizations. Under the leadership of Jimmie Åkesson since 2005, the SD claims to have underwent a process of reform and have sought to position itself as a more mainstream party by expelling hardline members and moderating its beliefs, building on a work that had begun during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, the SD officially rejects fascism and Nazism on their platform and since 2012 claims to have maintained a zero-tolerance policy against "extremists", "lawbreakers", and "racists". In 2025, the SD issued an official apology for its previous links to neo-Nazism during its early years.
The Sweden Democrats oppose current Swedish immigration and integration policies, instead supporting stronger restrictions on immigration and measures for immigrants to assimilate into Swedish culture. The Sweden Democrats are critical of multiculturalism and support having a common national and cultural identity, which they believe improves social cohesion. The party supports the Swedish welfare state but is against providing welfare to people who are not Swedish citizens and permanent residents of Sweden. The Sweden Democrats support a mixed market economy combining ideas from the centre-left and centre-right. The party supports same-sex marriage, civil unions for gay couples, and gender-affirming surgery but prefers that children be raised in a traditional nuclear family and argues that churches or private institutions should have the final say on performing a wedding over the state. The SD also calls for a ban on forced, polygamous or child marriages and stricter enforcement of laws against honour violence. The Sweden Democrats support keeping Sweden's nuclear power plants in order to mitigate climate change but argues that other countries should reduce their greenhouse gas emissions instead of Sweden, which the party believes is doing enough to reduce their emissions. The Sweden Democrats support generally increasing minimum sentences for crimes, as well as increasing police resources and personnel. The party also supports increasing the number of Swedish Army brigades and supports raising Sweden's defense spending.
Support for the Sweden Democrats has grown steadily since the 1990s and the party crossed the 4% threshold necessary for parliamentary representation for the first time during the 2010 Swedish general election, polling 5.7% and gaining 20 seats in the Riksdag. This increase in popularity has been compared by international media to other similar anti-immigration movements in Europe. The party received increased support in the 2018 Swedish general election, when it polled 17.5% and secured 62 seats in parliament, becoming the third largest party in Sweden. The Sweden Democrats were formerly isolated in the Riksdag until the late 2010s, with other parties maintaining a policy of refusing cooperation with them. In 2019, the leader of the Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch announced that her party was ready to start negotiations with the Sweden Democrats in the Riksdag, as did Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson. In the 2022 Swedish general election, the party ran as part of a broad right-wing alliance with those two parties and the Liberals, and came second overall with 20.5% of the vote. Following the election and the Tidö Agreement, it was negotiated that SD agreed to support a Moderate Party-led government together with the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. It is the first time that SD holds direct influence over the government.
History
Early years (1988–1995)
The Sweden Democrats party was founded in 1988 as a direct successor to the Sweden Party, which in turn had been formed in 1986 by the merger of the activist group Bevara Sverige Svenskt and a faction of the Swedish Progress Party. The SD continued to use Keep Sweden Swedish as its slogan until the late 1990s. The SD claims 6 February 1988 as the date of its foundation and that the party was formally registered after a meeting in Stockholm designed to bring together various nationalist movements who issued a white paper for a new party, although observers tend to see the party's foundation as part of a complex decade-long series of events, with some even calling into question whether a meeting took place.Initially, the SD did not have a single centralized leader and was instead fronted by two alternating spokespeople before Anders Klarström became the party's first official chairman and head of the Sweden Democrats' national board in 1989.
According to the anti-racism publication Expo and the political historian Duncan McDonnell, it is generally agreed that the Sweden Democrats have never been an exclusively neo-Nazi political party, although 60% of the SD's founders and early members had previously belonged to both Swedish and foreign neo-fascist and white nationalist groups. The party also had a reputation in the late 1980s and early 1990s for attracting skinhead gangs to its public events. Studies by Expo documented that around nine of the original 30 people who founded the SD had associations to known Nordic fascist parties such as the New Swedish Movement and the neo-Nazi Nordic Realm Party while another eighteen had been part of the Keep Sweden Swedish organization. The study estimated that around sixty percent of party's national board members between 1989 and 1995 were connected to neo-Nazi movements in various ways both before and during their time in the party. The study noted that a majority of these members were no longer active within the party by the mid-to-late-1990s. However, an investigation by the same magazine, Expo, reportedly revealed that about 50 Sweden Democrats had links to groups that the party officially distancesd itself from. Several of the party's municipal council candidates in the 2010 elections had been active on Nazi online forums, where they sought to contact other white power groups, and denied the Holocaust.
The party's first auditor, Gustaf Ekström, was a Waffen-SS veteran and had been a member of the national socialist party Svensk Socialistisk Samling in the1940s. The SD's first chairman Anders Klarström and party co-founders and first board members Fritz Håkansson, Gösta Bergqvist and had all been members of the Nordic Realm Party. Klarström later elaborated he had briefly been part of the NRP as a teenager before distancing himself from it by the time he became SD leader. The first version of the SD's old youth-wing, the Sweden Democratic Youth was accused of having dual leadership with neo-Nazi youth movements until 1995 while the SD's logo from the 1990s until 2006 was a version of the torch used by the British National Front. The SD also encountered controversy for some of its early policy ideas before 1999, which included a proposal to repatriate most immigrants who came to Sweden from 1970, banning adoption of foreign born children and reinstating the death penalty.
The party promoted concerts by the Swedish offshoot of Rock Against Communism and sponsored music of the nationalist Viking rock band Ultima Thule. Various party officials today acknowledge that being fans of Ultima Thule's music factored prominently in their decision to become politically engaged. Early on, the party's newspaper SD-Kuriren promoted connections to its readers such as the National Democratic Party of Germany, the American National Association for the Advancement of White People, British politician John Tyndall and publications like the Nazi Nation Europa and Nouvelle École, a newspaper that advocates racial biology and the British neo-Nazi Combat 18 movement.
The SD won municipal representation for the first time during the 1991 Swedish local elections in Dals-Ed Municipality and Höör.
Moderation and growth (1995–2010)
In 1995, Klarström was replaced as SD chairman by Mikael Jansson, a former member of the Centre Party. Jansson strove to make the party more respectable and took a direct stance against displays of extremism within its ranks. In 1995, the SD closed down its youth-wing and after skinheads started to impose on SD meetings, consuming alcohol at party events, displaying fascist imagery and the wearing of any kind of political uniform were formally banned in 1996. Also in 1996, it was revealed that an SD spokeswoman Tina Hallgren, had been to a party meeting of National Socialist Front posing in a Nazi uniform. Opposition to the party have mistakenly mixed these two events together and falsely claim that she was wearing the uniform at a rally of the Sweden Democrats and that it was because of this that the uniform ban came about. During the early 1990s, the SD sought to become a more conventional political party and became more influenced by the French National Rally, as well as the Freedom Party of Austria, the Danish People's Party, German The Republicans and Italian National Alliance. SDreceived economic support for the 1998 election from the then called French National Front, and became active in Jean-Marie Le Pen's Euronat from the same time. By the end of the decade, the party took further steps to moderate itself by distancing itself from all forms of fascist ideology, softening its policies on immigration and capital punishment and removing party figures deemed to be too radical. In 1999, the SD left Euronat although the youth wing remained affiliated until 2002. In 2001, the most extreme faction was expelled from the party, leading to the formation of the more radical National Democrats which in turn resulted in many of the SD's remaining hardline members leaving for the new party.During the early 2000s, a reformist faction known as the so-called "Scania gang", also known as the "Gang of Four" or "Fantastic Four", which consisted of the youth wing chairman Jimmie Åkesson, as well as Björn Söder, Mattias Karlsson and Richard Jomshof continued and expanded the moderation policy, which included ousting openly extremist members, banning neo-Nazi activists from attending party events or obtaining membership, and further revising the SD's policy platform. Before the 2002 election, former Member of Parliament for the Moderate Party, Sten Andersson defected to SD, citing that the party had gotten rid of its extreme-right elements. In 2003, the party declared the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be a cornerstone of its policies. In 2005, Åkesson defeated Jansson in a leadership contest. Shortly after, the party changed its logo from the flaming torch to one featuring an Anemone hepatica, reminiscent of the party's very first, but short-lived, logo.