I came to Sweden in 1997 to work on a Baltic Sea cruise ship, and ships teach you one thing about facades: fresh paint hides rust only until the first storm.
The storm came on 13 September. In Aftonbladet, Jan Scherman argues that SD lost more than votes. For the first time since its openly Nazi-rooted days in the late 1980s, he writes, the party dropped its democratic mask by questioning whether every citizen’s vote should count.
His evidence starts with Jimmie Åkesson in SVT’s final debate, warning that Muslim immigration could decide a Swedish election, followed by “Sug på den” – chew on that. I have chewed. It tastes like 1918.
Because Scherman has done his homework. When women demanded the vote, the right-wing leader Ernst Trygger warned against doubling the electorate with people lacking political experience, and former prime minister Arvid Lindman found women too emotional for decisions. Back then the dangerous voter was the old Swedish woman. Today it is the new Swede: Swedish-Somali, Swedish-Syrian, Swedish-Pakistani and, yes, Swedish-Kashmiri. Same sermon, new congregation.
Then came the chorus. Kent Ekeroth called new citizens voting cattle and the election stolen. As a former union representative I have been called many things by management; livestock is new. At least cattle get a vet.
SD’s chief ideologist Mattias Karlsson found the opposition’s 97.6 percent in Rosengård “North Korean”, and Moderate MP Fredrik Kärrholm said Saddam Hussein would be jealous. Curious. In the wealthiest areas, around eight in ten vote for the Tidö parties, and nobody calls Danderyd a dictatorship. When old Swedes vote alike, it is called values. When new Swedes do, it is called herding.
The sharpest irony Scherman saves for the Liberals: partners of the Social Democrats in the 1918 fight for suffrage, now embracing the party that doubts it. And Ulf Kristersson, he notes, has not said one word.
Now, fairness, because a column without it is just a pamphlet. None of these politicians has formally proposed taking the vote away from citizens. SD would say it is criticising Islamism and citizenship policy, not suffrage, and Scherman’s conclusion is his own inference, in a clearly labelled opinion piece. But when a party leader flags certain citizens’ votes as a problem before the count, and his colleagues call the result stolen after it, the inference is not a long walk.
The real scandal lies elsewhere. In the most affluent areas almost everyone votes; in the most vulnerable ones, barely half do. The problem is not that the suburbs voted. It is that half of them did not.
On the ship, those who scrubbed the deck were never asked about the course. We organised until we were. Old Swedes won that fight in 1921. New Swedes inherited it, along with the taxes. You do not get to love democracy only when the passenger list suits you.
Talat Bhat is a Swedish-Kashmiri filmmaker, former seaman and former union representative for immigrant workers on the M/S Baltic Star.