The electoral breakthrough of Nordic radical-right wing parties

The success of the previously isolated Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) in the national elections 2022, gave the party direct access to governmental decision-making in Sweden for the first time. The result didn´t happen overnight. With the parliamentary breakthrough and the rapid electoral growth of the Sweden Democrats since 2010, the mainstreaming of its narrative and policies among some of the other parliamentary parties and the acceptance of the SD as a legitimate party with governmental credibility has been established. The isolationist strategy, towards the Sweden Democrats, has definitively come to an end in 2022.

In Finland, the upcoming national elections will take place on April the 2^nd 2023. It is still to early to predict the election results. However, at the last elections 2019 the Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) turned out second biggest party and at the end of 2022, the party polls third biggest party with about 17 Percent. In the highly pragmatic Finnish political culture, the other parliamentary parties have broadly accepted the PS as a normal party and engaged in legislative cooperation with it.

Read our two new reports written by the researchers Ann-Cathrine Jungar and Sanna Salo.

This report discusses the reactions of Finnish parliamentary parties to the electoral breakthough of the Finns Party.

The Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset, PS) is a radical right-wing populist party that is widely accepted as a normalised element of the Finnish political landscape. The party made its electoral breakthrough in the 2011 Eduskunta election, when it received 19.1 per cent of the vote. In Finland’s highly pragmatic political culture, multi-party cross-bloc coalitions are normal, and all parliamentary parties routinely engage in legislative cooperation, particularly in parliamentary committees. The other parties have not built a cordon sanitaire against the Finns Party, and the party was part of a rightwing coalition government from 2015–2019. The party has affected Finnish politics by raising the salience of immigration and law-andorder issues and attempting to stretch the limits of acceptable political speech, also in parliament.

The electoral breakthrough of the Finns Party

This report describes the reactions of the Swedish parliamentary parties to the electoral breakthrough of the Sweden Democrats.

This report describes the parliamentary breakthrough and the rapid electoral growth of the Sweden Democrats since 2010, the mainstreaming of its narrative and policies
among some of the other parliamentary parties and the acceptance of the SD as a legitimate party with governmental credibility.
Within a decade, the Sweden Democrats have fundamentally transformed the Swedish political landscape when it comes to
party competition, government formation as well as political debate and decision-making and the isolationist strategy towards the Sweden Democrats, came to an end in 2022.
It remains to be seen in what ways Sweden will change with this conservative turn.

Normalising the Pariah: The Sweden Democrats Path from Isolation to Government

Ann-Cathrine Jungar is an associate professor in political science at the Department of Social Sciences at Södertörn University in Stockholm. She has a PhD from the Department of Government at Uppsala University.

Sanna Salo is a Finnish political sociologist and an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

Contact:

Josefin Fürst
josefin.furst(at)fes.de