LEADER • Now the Swedish people – but also many others residing in our fatherland – are going to the polls. In just a few decades, Sweden has reshaped its population through historically large-scale immigration. Less has been said about how this development also changes the electorate – and politics. A dangerous trend has emerged where parties have discovered that people are easier to mobilize as ethnic and religious collectives than as independent citizens. The democratic paradox is that democratic processes can be used to decide to abolish democracy. Sweden is on its way to becoming an example of this.

Democracy is more than universal and equal suffrage and elections every four years. It presumes a fundamental, shared democratic culture, where there is at least an agreement that democracy is better than theocracy and dictatorship.

Citizens do not need to agree on specific political issues. The idea of democracy is that people with different opinions should be able to compete for power peacefully. But basic agreement on the rules of the game is required – freedom of expression and opinion, personal freedom, gender equality, secularism, equality before the law, and respect for political opponents.

Something as elementary as a common language and some form of shared public sphere is also necessary. We have less of this with every year of irresponsible immigration and citizenships handed out without requirements.

People Bring Their Values With Them

Many individuals have left dictatorships, religious oppression, and patriarchal societies because they want to live in the freedom that Sweden and Western democracy offer. These can be an asset to Sweden and may even have a stronger appreciation for freedom and democracy than those of us who have never lacked them.

But it is unrealistic to conclude that everyone moving from Somalia to Sweden does so for these reasons, leaves behind their values, and adopts ours. But this is the image migration liberals have foisted upon us while at the same time trying to silence critics by branding them with pejorative labels.

Many – a majority – are economic migrants. They have chosen Sweden because it has been easy to get residency and then citizenship here, because economic benefits and access to publicly-funded services are extensive, and demands to adapt to our society are low. They do not want to become Swedish, only to enjoy the Swedish standard of living and welfare.

For a long time, Sweden has had substantial immigration from countries where democracy, secularism, gender equality, individual autonomy, religious criticism, and the rights of sexual minorities have a much weaker standing than here. In these societies, religion, family, and clan play a larger role than the individual.

On top of this comes segregation in Sweden. If one so wishes, life can be lived in one’s old mother tongue, surrounded by people of the same origin, same culture, and same religion, and with media from the homeland just a few clicks away, there is no need to become part of the Swedish public sphere.

Integration is so weak that large groups live in Sweden without sufficiently participating in the society whose future they will help decide. They do not master the Swedish language – the carrier of political discourse – and may not even accept the fundamental premises for a democratic society as outlined at the beginning of this text.

The Electorate Is Changing Rapidly

During the current parliamentary term, around 200,000 people have been granted Swedish citizenship. Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea are among the largest countries of origin. India, stateless persons (mainly Palestinians), Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and people whose country of origin could not be determined but who received Swedish citizenship nevertheless, are also high on the list.

Statistics from the Migration Agency on countries of origin show that about 85–90 percent of citizenships during this parliamentary period have gone to people from countries outside the Western sphere.

This has gone on for decades – while governments of different stripes but with the same immigration-liberalism philosophy have succeeded one another. Today’s governing coalition is the first to do something to curb the tsunami, and the Sweden Democrats (SD) can take all the credit. This has had an effect toward the end of the parliamentary term, from nearly 66,000 citizenships in 2024 to under 39,000 in 2025 due to requirements for proven identity and personal appearance – something one might argue should always have been obvious – and from mid-year further reductions through newly tightened citizenship rules.

Migration policy is also democracy policy. It’s not just about what education one brings, but also what values. An Iranian dentist, Pakistani system developer, or Chinese chef might be economically productive but democratically burdensome, with divergent values and other loyalties.

When hundreds of thousands of people become Swedish citizens, they also become voters in the parliamentary elections. Thus, the demographic preconditions of political power shift gradually. This is already clearly visible in party sympathies.

According to a Novus poll recently reported by Fokus, the Social Democrats, the Left Party, and the Green Party together receive 85 percent of the Muslim voters’ sympathies. The Moderates get 2.1 percent, Christian Democrats 1.5, and the Liberals 0.2 percent. The government parties together achieve only 3.8 percent in this electorate – below the parliamentary threshold.

The Sweden Democrats are also extremely far from the left-green parties’ levels among this group. This trend is not new. Already after the 2010 election, SVT pointed out that almost seven in ten voters who grew up outside Sweden voted for the left-green bloc.

A New Underclass

Election researcher and political science professor Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson offers a primarily socioeconomic explanation:

“These are groups that are socially weakly integrated and are dependent on benefits and redistribution. It is a new kind of underclass. Pretty much the same explanation we would have given for poor working families 30 years ago.”

There is something to that. For a long time, Sweden was a class society and people voted accordingly. The worker voted Social Democrat as naturally as the business owner voted for the right. As class differences shrank and living conditions converged, voter mobility increased.

Now class-based voting is being recreated in a new and more problematic form. The old industrial worker and business executive could be far apart economically and politically. But they spoke the same language, took part in the same social debate, and had the same points of reference regarding Sweden, the country where they had lived for many generations. Today’s segregation is not only socioeconomic as Ekengren Oscarsson wants to claim. What segregates is also language, religion, ethnicity, and cultural norms.

This raises rarely asked questions. The simplest is how independently and well-informed one can participate in Swedish democracy if one does not speak Swedish well enough to follow political debate. Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oscar Bohlin (M) was recently criticized for speaking too good Swedish. It was considered not sufficiently “inclusive,” as so many in Sweden speak such poor Swedish.

Language skills are not a peripheral integration matter. Nor is it only about managing daily life or the labor market. It also has an important democratic aspect. New research on voter turnout in Malmö – where Swedes are on the way to becoming a minority – also finds a link between better language skills and higher voter turnout.

There may also be a correlation between how well one understands Swedish and which parties one votes for. Those who cannot follow Swedish media and political debates themselves become more dependent on intermediaries. It may be the family, the association, religious leaders, political campaigners, or media from the former homeland.

With such intermediaries, the possibility increases to mobilize people as a collective rather than as individuals, and the risk of undue influence at the group level and of directing voters rather than informing them increases.

When Parties Discover the Collective

It is a problem if, as a Muslim, Syrian, Somali, or other immigrant, one votes overwhelmingly for a certain party based on religion or views on Gaza. Wallet issues have always been part of the campaign, but also become a problem if the focus is on social benefits among groups who do not work, do not fit into the job market, or do not want to. This is a distributive policy distortion.

A greater problem arises when political parties realize this on a collective level and see people less as individual citizens and more as demographic voter blocs. When they start adjusting their politics to maximize votes among groups for whom what is non-Swedish is more important than what is Swedish.

The left-green parties obviously have much to gain from mobilization in areas dense with immigrants. During the election campaign, campaigns have been run in Arabic and other languages. The Social Democrats have conducted organized vote mobilization in Rosengård, and the Palestine question – along with anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism – has been given an increasingly prominent role, particularly on the left.

This could be called a conspiracy, but ordinary political opportunism suffices. A party discovers a large and growing voter group. It identifies which issues and which key individuals mobilize the group. Policies and rhetoric are adapted. Key individuals are courted.

Representative democracy works a bit that way – politicians keep their ears to the ground and give voters what they want. The other side of the coin is to become a politician because you hold certain values, stick to them, and try to persuade voters that they are the best – through good times and bad, sometimes with backbone, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

The former is sometimes scorned as populism. It is strange that there is much talk of “right-wing populism” when the Sweden Democrats catch the people’s critical sentiments about an increasingly un-Swedish Sweden, but never about “left-wing populism” when the Social Democrats pick up on the opinions of the Muslim diaspora that Sweden is too Swedish and needs to be a little more like the Middle East for them to feel at home.

In both cases, democracy is changing. For many, it’s a positive change if Malmö remains Malmö – or returns to that. Then, you vote SD. For others, it is more pleasant if Malmö becomes more like Mogadishu. Then, you vote Social Democrat.

It has been said that the traditional left-right scale, centering on economic issues, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. There has been talk of GAL-TAN, of identity politics, of culture wars. While not everything, much of this change can be linked to Sweden’s rapid transformation from an ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous nation to its opposite. From belonging and harmony to division and tensions deeper than distributive politics – a struggle for and against the Swedish national soul.

When political rewards are distributed based on ethnic or religious group affiliation, a feedback loop and vicious circle arises – demographic change creates new voter blocs, these blocs change party politics, and the changed policies in turn reinforce identification with the voter bloc.

The Naivety and Incompetence of the Right

It would be too simple to place all the blame with the Social Democrats and the left. Right-wing politicians enthusiastically contributed for a long time to the migration policy that created today’s demographic situation. During the Reinfeldt years, the Moderates were an explicitly immigration-liberal party. The Liberals and Centre Party continued even longer.

They started from the naïve assumption that Sweden’s population could be fundamentally changed without also changing Sweden politically. The left has at least been quicker to understand the new reality and exploit it as a tool for political power.

As the Social Democrats’ old working-class voters have turned to the Sweden Democrats, other voter groups have become more strategically important. If these are also socioeconomically weak, then Ekengren Oscarsson’s new underclass becomes politically attractive to a party whose historic core business is redistribution.

An Unhealthy Symbiosis

An unhealthy symbiosis has grown out of this. Voters become dependent on political decisions on benefits and public services. Parties become dependent on the votes of these voters. And the political incentive to break the cycle of exclusion weakens.

Politicians promise economic security but provide only a fraction so that the voter group does not make a true class journey, identify as something other than disadvantaged, and start voting for other parties, as the working class did. It is cynical. Keeping a large group of immigrants in exclusion is necessary to maintain them as a voting base.

Real Democracy Requires Real Citizens

But the interests of Sweden and Swedes do not coincide with liberals’ need for virtue signaling and even less with the Social Democrats’ power ambitions. On the contrary, they diverge increasingly as more citizenships are handed out without citizens being created in any deeper sense – Swedes on paper, something entirely different in heart and soul.

The government’s investigation into integration goals has identified democratic integration as a special priority and highlighted knowledge of Swedish society, the Swedish language, participation, and respect for fundamental democratic norms as essential conditions.

A country that welcomes people from all over the world must therefore set higher, not lower, requirements for what holds the country together. Long before citizenship is considered, the newcomer must have gone from benefits to work, from parallel society to societal cohesion, from clan member to independent individual, from religious submission to secular democrat, and from demands for special treatment to acceptance of equality before Sweden’s laws, rules, values, and customs.

One should have chosen Sweden because one wants all of this, but at a minimum, it must be understood that this is a requirement if one wants to settle here and enjoy the full smorgasbord of Swedish prosperity and welfare. And political parties must resist the temptation to buy collective loyalty by keeping immigrants bound to old clan identities, in socioeconomic exclusion, and with special promises, special considerations, and special exemptions.

There are many dangers to demographic change on a scale that has been described as an ongoing population replacement, when the country is increasingly populated by people from Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan and granted Swedish citizenship with neither the will nor the requirement to have first assimilated.

But the greatest danger is the political one. When our parties, out of short-sighted power ambitions, encourage collective clan voting, cement ethnic socioeconomic segregation, and replace electioneering pork with halal-slaughtered mutton, they put Sweden’s future at risk. This is our greatest security policy threat, even if the politicians who created it do their best to divert our attention to other threats.