Sweden’s parliament on Monday appointed Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson as minister at the head of a three-party minority coalition that, for the first time, includes a role for Sweden’s anti-immigration Democrats in government.
The coalition of moderate, Christian Democrats and Liberals plans to cut taxes, limit benefits, tighten immigration regulations and give more powers to police as part of a political deal with Sweden’s Democrats, who are now the largest right after September’s election.
Kristersson will not count on the Sweden Democrats, a party rooted in white supremacism, but his government faces an economic recession, war in Ukraine and a cost-of-living crisis that has sent food and electricity costs soaring.
Kristersson will update Magdalena Andersson, who leads Sweden’s largest party, the Social Democrats, now in opposition. Supporting Sweden’s historic attempt to join NATO after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, that attempt is being questioned lately by Turkey.
“Sweden is a country that is experiencing several parallel crises at the same time,” Kristersson told reporters. “I don’t think the demanding situations facing the new government are easy. “
In the September 11 elections, the right-wing bloc won a narrow majority, winning 176 seats in the 349-member parliament.
The Sweden Democrats won 20. 5 percent of the vote in September, compared with 19. 1 percent for moderates, but Swedish Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson may not get enough to lead a government.
However, his party has had a significant impact on the policies of the new government, marking a turning point in Swedish politics, long regarded as synonymous with liberal values and openness.
The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by far-right extremists. Akesson took office in 2005, but until 2018, no one had anything to do with them.
His message that decades of overly beneficial immigration policies are driving a backlog of shootings and gang crimes has struck a chord with the electorate in recent years.
Akesson said he would have closet seats for the Sweden Democrats but subsidized the treatment he would give his party influence over government policy, adding immigration and corrupt justice.
The coalition is “authoritarian, conservative and nationalist,” Green Party leader Per Bolund said.
Successive administrations have tightened immigration laws over the past decade, but the new coalition will move even further to the right.
The prestige of asylum will be temporary and the Government plans to make it difficult for new immigrants to obtain benefits. Incentives for voluntary repatriation will also be reviewed “with special emphasis on those that have not been integrated”.
The Swedish Democrat leader declared that the new government’s mandate would mark a “paradigm shift” in immigration policy characterized by “order, explanation of why and common sense. “criminal gangs and sentences for gang offenses will be longer.
The center-left opposition sharply criticized the new coalition, with Lena Hallgren of the Social Democrats calling it a “strange construct. “
Nooshi Dadpassstar, leader of the former Communist Left Party, said his parents, who fled Iran, may never have imagined Sweden would go down an authoritarian path.
“What is happening in Sweden right now is scary,” he told parliament.
With The Associated Press
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