Crime surge puts Sweden's Social Democrats on brink of defeat

As I write this post, Sweden's center-right bloc has taken a narrow lead in today’s general election. With 94 percent of the vote counted, it is winning 176 seats in the 349-seat parliament. The center-left bloc is winning 173.

The election is too close to call at this point. However, if the current count holds, it will mean that time’s up for the Social Democrats, after eight years of rule.

Moreover, the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, is set to overtake the Moderates as Sweden's second party and the first party in the opposition bloc. That’s quite an accomplishment for a party that only made it into parliament twelve years ago, with less than six percent of the vote, and until recently was shunned by the parties that are now its coalition partners. In this election, support for the Sweden Democrats is around 21 percent.

Even so, Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderates, is expected to be the new prime minister if the center-right bloc prevails. He says he’ll rely on the Sweden Democrats only for support in parliament. However, this may be hard to accomplish given that the party he wants to keep at arms length will be bigger than his.

What accounts for the success of the Sweden Democrats and the possible fall from of the Social Democrats? One common answer — immigration — isn’t wrong, exactly. However, I believe the more accurate answer is crime, with inflation second.

The New York Times says that “the focus on crime stands out in a nation where ideological conflicts have traditionally centered on taxes, the economy and government benefits.” It quotes a political science professor who contends that crime now has “a cultural dimension that has to do with migration and identity and morals.”

Probably, at least as to migration. But the crime stats alone seem sufficient to explain the focus on it. According to this report, so far in 2022 the Swedish police have registered 47 killings and 273 shootings in Sweden. That’s a bad month in some American cities, but it puts Sweden on track for its deadliest year in a series of what, for the Swedes, has been a series of violent years.

Manne Gerell, an associate professor of criminology at Malmö University, points out that “two decades ago, Sweden had about the same number of shootings per capita as England and Wales, but now Sweden’s rates are many times higher.”

There’s little doubt that this surge in violent crime is the product of mass immigration. And there’s little doubt that voters are fed up with these twin developments.

Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democrat prime minister, recognizes this. She has called for significant enlargement of the police force, crackdowns on gangs, and longer prison sentences. And she has acknowledged the connection between the surge in violence and immigration.

However, her coalition partners — in particular the Left Party and the Green Party — haven’t gone along with her rhetoric. They continue to support a liberal immigration policy.

Swedish voters know who is serious about combatting violent crime. It’s the coalition that has edged ahead in today’s election and, in particular, the party that is now the most popular member of that coalition.

Do American voters have the same knowledge about our two parties? Like Sweden, the U.S. has experienced a significant increase in violent crime. And violent crime is much more prevalent here than in Sweden.

Yet for the most part, American voters have not held politicians accountable for failing to implement tough-on-crime policies and for doing next to nothing to halt illegal immigration. (Nor is it clear that American voters will hold politicians accountable for contributing to inflation — the other problem that’s said to be driving the Swedish election.)

Sweden’s prime minister tried to save her job by at least talking sensibly about crime. Joe Biden won’t do it.

Instead of talking about longer sentences for criminals, he’s talking as if the January 6 mob and its sympathizers are the main threat to law and order in America. And he’s claiming that Republicans are anti-police because a few members of that mob attacked members of the Capitol police.

Has Joe Biden underestimated the intelligence of the American public? We’ll soon find out.