In Sweden, the mainstream parties are so afraid of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, that they have announced a broad left-right coalition designed to marginalize the so-called “far-right” party. The deal means the snap elections called for March are now cancelled. According to a Swedish political analyst quoted by the NYT, “Basically, the idea is to not allow the Sweden Democrats to have any influence.”

Well, if the SD were a neo-fascist party, one could understand it. I know nothing about Swedish politics, but this uncomplimentary profile of the party from The Guardian makes the SD sound like garden-variety European populists. You have to be very, very skeptical of the label “far right” as applied by the establishment — media, political, academic — towards populist parties. I learned this over a decade ago, covering the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch libertarian who before his murder was headed toward a victory that would have made him prime minister. I assumed he was a Jörg Haider/Jean-Marie Le Pen type, because that’s how our media covered him. In fact, he was an openly gay libertarian, indeed a libertine, whose rise to power came because he was the only national politician willing to speak openly about the Netherlands’ serious problems with Muslim immigrants. I interviewed a conservative law professor in Holland who shook his head in disbelief that a man as liberal as Fortuyn would be labeled a far-rightist, or any kind of rightist, simply because of his position on immigration.

This is how the Eurocratic establishment works, though: demonize any opposition as crypto-Nazi. So, don’t be quick to accept the “far right” label on these parties.

But that doesn’t mean the label never fits. What about the Sweden Democrats? Here is an analysis from Britain’s conservative magazine The Spectator, analyzing the meaning of the SD’s showing in this fall’s elections. Excerpt:

They call themselves “Sweden’s only opposition party”, the implication being that the Stockholm elite is one indistinguishable blob of vested interest.  Like UKIP, they say they are neither left or right. I’d put them closer to Maine Le Pen’s National Front in being anti-immigration and protectionist. Is Ms Romson fair to compare them to racists? There is no doubt that the Sweden Democrats have moved towards the mainstream in recent years and tried to address racism within their ranks. Their language is a mixture of Salmond/Farage-style anger at the elite and populism. The below tweet from a Swede is a fair point:-

Yes, note that point. These guys don’t want fascism — they want a return to 1950s-style Swedish social democracy. From Dominic Green’s helpful — and by no means supportive of the SD — article in the Weekly Standard:

Sweden has led the way in Euro-pean immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular. Some 20 percent of Sweden’s 9.5 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants: the highest figure in Europe. Most European states were until recently monocultural. They have trouble assimilating immigrants, especially rural Muslims who wish to keep their cultural and religious identity. Sweden has applied the noblest of ideals—shelter to the oppressed—with the narrowness of mind that can happen when you live in a small society on the quiet side of the Baltic. The state has failed to assimilate its immigrants. Ordinary Swedes, both indigenous and immigrant, have paid the social cost. In a May 2014 poll, 44 percent of respond-ents wanted the new government to reduce immigration.

Nigel Farage of UKIP likes to be photographed holding a frothing pint of bitter and a cigarette. Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats looks like a ’50s rocker. He longs for the days when the welfare state was strong and society coherent. It turns out that plenty of Swedes feel the same. Last week, the comments sections of Swedish press websites abounded in conversions from both left and right. All said the same thing: Mass immigration has dissolved Sweden’s social cohesion and overburdened the welfare system. The established parties are too cowardly or corrupt to stop the rot. The Sweden Democrats are not; and so, holding his or her nose, the voter backed them.

Green continues:

If Sweden leads the way, Europe’s political future is grim: a governing class unwilling to acknowledge a systemic failure of democracy, a populist backlash against immigration and the EU superstate, and deep hostility between an aging indigenous population and a fertile immigrant one. This is bad for Sweden and bad for Europe. And a weak, introverted, and increasingly extremist Europe is bad for the United States, too.

Green says that the Sweden Democrats are “a party of ethnic grievance.” That strikes me as probably unfair. The Swedish government does not keep statistics on the ethnicity of its immigrants, though it does track which countries they’re migrating from. From what I can tell — and please, correct me if I’m wrong — the SD voters are complaining about immigration, period, and that includes immigration from “white” countries. They pretty clearly have a sense of nationalist grievance, but again, so what? Why is this essentially wrong? If it can be recast as an ethnic grievance, then it doesn’t have to be addressed; it is assumed that it must be wrong, because it’s white people who are expressing the grievance.

If the SD voters are complaining about the immigrants who aren’t being assimilated, and who do not wish to live under Swedish norms, and these immigrants are identifiably Muslim, isn’t that a religious or a cultural grievance, not an ethnic one? “Muslim” isn’t an ethnicity. This might sound like nitpicking, but these distinctions matter. If noticing that certain undesirable behaviors, even criminal ones, are associated with particular groups can be demonized as racist or neo-fascist, then public discussion of how to contend with this phenomenon does not have to happen. The Noticers can be denounced as evil, and marginalized from the coalition of the Decent.

But the problems don’t go away. The Swedish political establishment’s decision to close ranks against the Swedish Democrats does nothing to address the problems caused by the country’s very generous immigration policy. When mainstream parties will not deal with real and legitimate concerns, they only empower those that will.