The Sweden Democrats started as a anti-immigrant campaign and in the early years were mostly doing extremely blatant, racist, antisemitic and anti-black propaganda (stickers, posters, radio broadcasts) and organising demonstrations which attracted loads of neo-nazi skinheads. Leading to riots and attacks around their events. This was in the dark decade of the 90s, the atmosphere was similar in Sweden to most of Europe with neofascism returning to the open. Murders, arsons against refugee camps, the wave was everywhere. There are photos from their early years with officials wearing swastika armbands. Since in these groups we know historically that everyone wants to be the Führer they had the more radical individuals trying to coup the party leading to several splinter groups weakening them. This problem plus a very strong antifascist campaign against them led to them taking on a more “serious” path trying to get off the street hooliganism and into local politics/councils. They succeeded with that and have become more and more mainstream to be able to grow, so their party program is now very watered down from their original nazi roots. Their focus now is “law and order” and anti-islam and they attract the general racist, conservative, uneducated, by far mostly male and by far mostly rural voters. They get around 20 % of the votes for over ten years now, if I remember correctly.

Initially all other parties refused to work with them in any way but this has started to weaken in recent years and after the last election the new right-wing government (“tories”, cristian democrats, a mish-mash of right-wing conservatives) decided to take them on as a “support party” in the parliament. So they are not in the government but directly influence the governments actions with their support votes, without them the government would be too weak. It’s really awful.

But even if they are now the 2nd or 3rd largest party they still house open fascists. And there is scandal after scandal happening. Someone already mentioned the recent “sieg heil” thing in a comment. A few years ago there was a scandal where three of the party’s most prominent parliamentary individuals had a night out, getting drunk, harassing people on the streets which ended up with them gearing up with metal rods from a building site getting ready for “a fight”. Of course these stupid nazi fucks filmed it all and it was leaked to media. So the party is forced to do cleanouts of these problematic individuals very often, but the party somehow STILL maintains more or less unaffected in the polls. Even though this self-proclaimed “law and order” party obviously has bonehead thugs in their leadership. It’s laughable. But tragic. It says a lot about the voting grounds in Sweden, there is so much everyday-racism.

With that said, Sweden is not really more racist than most other countries in Europe, I would even argue less so than most. This problem is identical everywhere, racism/fascism is deeply rooted culturally.

I hope this helps to understand this shameful party.

Today, not even close. The party has neo-nazi roots, but the vast majority of the “old-guard” are long gone (afaik), most of them ending up in AFS (swedish equivalent of AFD) or Nordfront (actual nazis). If someone behaves questionably, they tend to be thrown out head-first rather promptly.

The SD gained popularity and won their platform by a) becoming more moderate and b) being the only mainstream-ish party to speak out against the mass immigration waves of the 2010s, something which they at the time were entirely shunned for. Today however, almost all politicians agree that the open door policy for refugees and economic migrants went too far.

Many of our problems here in Sweden today have to some degree been caused or exacerbated by that careless era (not that there weren’t problems before). Seeing welfare systems be dismantled, schools closing, worsening healthcare, infrastructure etc. etc. whilst at the same time huge amounts of resources were diverted to immigrants pushes folks in that direction. It also really doesn’t help that many kinds of violent crime previously entirely unheard of have become commonplace in less than adecade.

They said things would go to shit, things went to shit, now more than a fifth of Swedish voters voted for them in the last election, making them the 2nd largest party.

All in all it’s not that surprising that bringing folks from one cultural extreme into a society at the opposite cultural extreme ends up causing tensions and issues…