Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards

Swedish election: The astonishing rise of right-wing Democrats

Deutsche Welle: As Europe awaits Swedish election results that balance on a knife's edge, some are asking: How did this happen?

In Sweden, a bastion of tolerance, a nationalist and anti-immigrant party is on the cusp of joining a right-wing coalition in government.

A look at the party's origins and trajectory provides some answers.

What is the current state of election results?
On Sunday, Sweden held nationwide elections for its legislature, the Riksdag.

Although 99.9% of the vote has now been counted, a winner has not yet been officially declared.

Exit polls Sunday night initially indicated victory for the Social Democrats' center-left coalition, which has been in power since 2014.

But as vote-counting progressed, the right-wing bloc consisting of the Liberals, Christian Democrats, Moderates and Sweden Democrats is on track to win, currently with 49.5% of the vote.

The left-wing coalition has 48.8% of the vote. Social Democrat Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has already conceded defeat.

While final results are expected at any moment, the Social Democrats have so far received the largest percentage of votes at 30.3%.

Currently, the Sweden Democrats are the second-strongest party, gaining 20.5% of the vote in their best-ever election performance. That makes them the biggest party on the right, in front of the Moderates who came as a close third with 19.1%.

The cliffhanger election is not expected to be resolved until all postal and absentee ballots are counted.

What is the origin of the Sweden Democrats?
Founded in 1988, the Sweden Democrats unified various elements in Sweden's far-right milieu, including fascists and white power proponents. "Some of them also had ties to openly neo-Nazi movements," said Johan Martinsson, a political science professor at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

Around the mid-90s, however, new party leadership publicly denounced Nazism.

"Gradually, the party began to normalize and ban outright racism," explained Martinsson, who has written an extensive paper on the party. Openly extremist members were ejected, and its platform reshaped.

But according to Bulent Kenes, a persecuted former editor of a Turkish newspaper who has been living in Sweden since seeking asylum since 2016, "They keep a hidden agenda." He believes the party merely put a compassionate face on its neo-Nazi ideology in order to make it more socially acceptable.

A fresh face in party leadership
In 2005, current party leader Jimmie Akesson came to head the group. Only 26 at the time, the former member of the Moderate party pushed the Sweden Democrat's image away from its far-right roots, taking it in more of a populist direction.

Paralleling other right-populist movements, the party sought to portray itself as "advocating for 'ordinary people' against a corrupt elite at the height of a global recession," wrote scholar Danielle Lee Tomson in a paper on the rise of the Sweden Democrats >>>