Swedish right-wing populists to key position

stockholm - The Swedes choose a new parliament on Sunday and the big winner seems to be the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats (SD). With their main theme 'too many immigrants from outside Europe' they could achieve almost a fifth of the votes. The thirty-year-old party has its roots in the extreme right, but party leader Jimmie Akesson distances himself from the most extreme cases.

Then the SD will soon be the second party of the country. How a coalition should be formed is, according to many observers, a mystery, but without the SD, that does not work. The other parties do not really want anything to do with the SD.

The Eurosceptic SD is not expected to be the only winner. Because even fierce opponents of the nationalist and sometimes racist SD are on profit. It is in Sweden now, as elsewhere in Western Europe, that voters abandon center left and center right.

These voters often have very different grievances against the government or politics, but the wave of more than 160,000 in 2015 mainly Syrian asylum seekers has a lot of friction and according to many a wave of crime. The SD still benefits from this, despite the fact that the immigration flow has been drastically curbed by the government under the leadership of the social democrat Stefan Löfven.

Löfvens Social Democrats, who have dominated Swedish politics for a hundred years, are according to polls at a dramatic low point: less than a quarter of the votes. The center-right liberals who call themselves Moderate, led by Ulf Kristersson, would stick around 18 percent and end up behind the SD.