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Notes -
The vindication of the Sweden Democrats may be at hand.
The Swedish elections are coming up and it looks like a tight race between the incumbent social democrat government and its alliance of small parties, and the Sweden democrats and other rightist parties.
As expected, the social democrats are throwing any accusations they can at the other side. Just before the weekend, two ministers held a press conference announcing the Sweden democrats were a threat to national safety, much like what Biden recently said about trump. The leader of the green party called Sweden democrat leader a nazi in an interview.
But this may all be in vain. As crime has increased in both spread and brutality, law and order is the top priority for many voters. As the Sweden democrats long ago warned that open borders would cause crime, they seem vindicated. The governing social democrats have held power for the last eight years, during which Sweden has gone from having one of the lowest rates of deadly shootings in Europe to one of the highest. The polls have SD a few points behind the social democrats, but as their voters are used to hiding their sympathies, it would not be surprising to see them get the most votes come election night.
The public shunning of Sweden democrats and the moral outrage over their neo-nazi roots and their populist rhetoric is everywhere in the election campaign. It seems to work on women, but SD is by far the biggest party among male voters. If SD can nab enough votes, they’ll form a coalition government with the moderate party and the Christian conservatives.
It would be interesting to see what an SD election win would do to public discourse in Sweden. Inner city elites and the educated hate SD, at least publically, and the rift between city folks and poor yokels would probably widen. It would be our equivalent to the Trump presidency.
No cordon sanitaire?
They have more or less conceded that they'll work with the sweden democrats. Their spokespeople have donwplayed the other's attacks on sweden democrats for a while now. There used to be a cordon sanitaire but now sweden democrats are simply too popular.
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Haven't the Swedish pollsters got pretty good at calibrating the polls to remove the "shy Tory effect" from SD vote estimates, or even overpredicting their share?
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