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STOCKHOLM — A far-right shadow is looming over Sweden’s imminent EU presidency.
Sweden has long been seen as a cooperative and constructive member of the EU with a succession of mainstream governments able to corral domestic parliamentary support for many of Brussels’ big ideas.
But a general election in September left the new center-right Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson dependent on the far-right, Euroskeptic Sweden Democrats (SD) for his parliamentary mandate. That’s raised a question mark over whether Stockholm can maintain momentum on the key files piling up in the EU’s in-tray.
Diplomats in Brussels — who were looking forward to the Swedish presidency as one that would be able to get things done — are now worried that the Sweden Democrats’ anti-EU tone will infect the way they operate.
“It’s news to no one that the Sweden Democrats are the parliament’s most EU critical party,” SD leader Jimmie Åkesson said during a parliamentary debate on EU affairs earlier this month. “We believe in cooperation … but we must move away from the almost manic idea that [Brussels] should meddle more and more in the politics of member states.”
The EU’s institutional architecture gives the country with the rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the EU — currently the Czech Republic — a central role in setting and progressing the bloc’s policy agenda. To that end, it is seen as helpful if the presidency country has a clear attitude to EU cooperation and a widely understood position on central issues on the agenda.
But the rise of SD, a party with neo-Nazi roots, has scrambled the picture of Swedish-EU relations for outsiders looking in. This is the first time SD has held real influence, and officials in Brussels are still figuring out what policy stances like its ultra-hard line on immigration and relatively friendly attitude to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary could mean for the way Sweden deals with the EU.
Swedish diplomats in Brussels have assured their colleagues that their presidency will be run from Brussels and not from Stockholm. That has reassured some in the Council, but the potential influence of SD has prompted unease among others in Brussels.
Iratxe García Pérez, the leader of the Socialists and Democrats group in the European Parliament tweeted following a recent trip to Stockholm: ”I expressed my concern about the negative influence that extreme-right Sweden Democrats will have not only on the Swedish government, but also the Swedish EU presidency starting in January.”
While Kristersson’s Moderate Party and its two smaller center-right coalition allies are staunchly pro-EU, SD pushed for a referendum on Sweden’s EU membership in the months after Brexit.
At the parliamentary debate in Stockholm this month, the dissonance in messaging between Kristersson and SD leader Åkesson was on full display.
“In my government, we see all the possibilities of a stronger EU,” Kristersson said as he opened the session.
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The EU is “peace,” “reconciliation,” “trade” and “the meeting of people,” he said. It is “freedom to move” and “mobile phones without roaming charges.”
Åkesson struck a harsher tone. He branded interactions with the EU by Swedish governments as “naive” and a form of “self-harming behavior.”
“Every nation and every people in Europe has the right to be masters in their own home,” he said.
SD now occupies an ambiguous place in Sweden’s politics. After a strong showing in September’s election, SD is the largest party in the four-party unit running the Nordic state of 10.5 million, but it sits outside the government.
The deal it has struck with Kristersson ensures it has a say over some key domestic policy areas, from migration to economic growth, but it can also be expected to flex its muscles when those issues come up at EU level.
“Obviously, in the same way as they do in domestic politics, they would like to have influence over core EU policies too,” said Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a political scientist at Södertörns University in Stockholm.
Migration pact in focus
Migration in particular has the potential to be a flash point. It is central to SD’s policy agenda and is set to be a high priority during the Swedish EU presidency. The latest phase of an ambitious reworking of Brussels’ migration and asylum policies — its Migration and Asylum Pact — is set for discussion, with member countries far apart on the issue.
Expectations had been high before the Swedish election that significant progress could be made on the pact during the Swedish presidency and that it could perhaps be completed during the subsequent Spanish or Belgian presidencies.
Sweden received among the highest rates per capita of asylum seekers during Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, and European diplomats believed that this had given the country outsize know-how on related issues. In addition, the European commissioner for home affairs, in charge of migration policy, is currently Swedish lawmaker Ylva Johansson.
But since Johansson’s Social Democrats were voted out of power in September, those hopes of progress have been fading in Brussels. SD has long pushed a line that Sweden must cut the number of people it grants asylum to to “as close to zero as possible,” and Sweden’s new government is committed to restricting migration.
Any EU move to share responsibilities for housing migrants between frontier states and states like Sweden — away from the bloc’s outer edge — are likely to be resisted by Åkesson and his party.
Such intransigence has rattled diplomats who see the migration pact as among the bloc’s most complex files. “If it was complicated before, it seems impossible now,” said one diplomat from Central Europe who follows the file closely.
But Tomas Tobé, a Swedish MEP from Prime Minister Kristersson’s Moderate Party, who served as European Parliament negotiator for the asylum and migration management regulation, said that he believed the EU migration file could be moved forward during the Swedish presidency and that it could still be completed before the end of the current European term.
“The new Swedish government knows that there are expectations on them,” he said.
Johansson is also positive about the chances of success: “You can have high expectation on the Swedish government,” she told POLITICO.
Rule of law
The outlook for the EU’s efforts to strengthen the rule of law within member countries — especially in Hungary and Poland — has also been clouded by the rise of SD, according to some observers.
The Commission concluded in November that Hungary had failed to meet a pledge to adopt 17 rule-of-law reforms in order to access €7.5 billion in EU funds, and in September the European Parliament voted to describe Hungary as no longer a democracy.
But SD MEP Charlie Weimers voted against the motion, a move fellow Swedish MEPs interpreted as a sign of approval for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom NGOs accuse of curbing media freedom and allowing corruption to flourish.
“Today we were again reminded that the Sweden Democrats do not stand up for the principles of the rule of law in the EU,” Swedish Liberal Party MEP Karin Karlsbro said after the vote. “The rest of the European Parliament is clear — Hungary can no longer be counted as a free democracy, but SD has Orbán’s back as usual.”
Experts say it remains unclear how SD will engage on migration or rule of law, or any of the rest of the 350 files on the agenda for the Swedes’ six month-long presidency.
Swedish Europe Minister Jessika Roswall said SD lawmakers in the Swedish parliament’s EU affairs select committee have committed to being “constructive” and what she had seen so far from the party had borne that out.
Roswall, who previously chaired that EU select committee, said that her background there negotiating with all the parties in parliament gave her confidence that different views could be considered and broad support for Sweden’s EU policies secured among the lawmakers.
“Even if sometimes we don’t think alike, we have the ambition to be an important country in the EU,” she said.
But much of SD’s appeal over recent years has come from its willingness to oppose the mainstream with one of its key slogans being “give ‘em hell.”
In 2014 and again in 2021, SD pushed the Swedish government to the brink of collapse, and on the campaign trail this year, Åkesson lashed out at opponents on both the left and the right.
In the parliamentary debate in mid-November, Åkesson acknowledged that Sweden, as a small export-dependent country, needed to cooperate with its neighbors. But that does not mean allowing more power to accumulate in Brussels, he said.
“It is not the same thing as wanting more power to go to other countries’ bureaucrats who we can’t choose and we can’t vote out,” he said.
