How Sweden’s far right went from political pariah to powerbroker

Once shunned by every major party, the Sweden Democrats have gone from political pariah to the heart of government.

There is an expression in Swedish, “to be let into the warmth” – meaning to be welcomed into the fold. In a country shaped by long, dark winters, the image speaks for itself.

A decade ago, the Sweden Democrats (SD), a far-right anti-immigration party with roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement, were firmly shut out in the cold.

But after the 2018 general election, a political deadlock prompted right-wing parties to rethink their alliances – and their principles.

Today, SD is Sweden’s second-largest party, providing the parliamentary support that keeps the current government in power. It is a party once shunned by every major political force, now far into the warmth.

SD were founded in the 1980s by Nazi sympathisers and born out of the far-right, skinhead movement “Keep Sweden Swedish”.

Its first auditor, Gustaf Ekstrom, was a veteran of the armed combat branch of the SS, a key organisation of Nazi Germany, and other executive members had belonged to violent far-right movements.

After the 1990s, SD attempted to “clean up their act” in order to escape being seen as neo-Nazis, Morgan Finnsio, a Swedish researcher who studies far-right movements at the Expo Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

One example he gave is their 2003 adoption of the idea of “open Swedishness”, meaning that Swedish identity is not biologically exclusive and that assimilation is – theoretically – possible, explained Finnsio.

In the period from 2014 until 2020, SD made further cosmetic changes and gestures towards moderation, rebranding themselves as a “conservative” party, he said.

SD’s leadership expelled the party’s youth wing for “extremism”, threw out some members, albeit inconsistently, and discouraged the sharing of far-right alternative media content, Finnsio said.

It also dropped its demand to leave the European Union and its opposition to NATO membership.

Daphne Halikiopoulou, chair in comparative politics at the University of York in England, told Al Jazeera that SD has trodden the same path as several other European hard far-right political parties, gradually altering their rhetoric and repackaging themselves as borderline far-right.

The party, she said, has “cleansed itself of its extremist elements” and rebranded itself with an innocent-looking flower as its logo, rather than a Viking.

In September 2010, SD crossed the 4 percent threshold and entered parliament for the first time, winning 20 seats.

Having spent years forming a narrative linking immigrat