By Christina Anderson and Steven Erlanger, The New York Times
STOCKHOLM — Sweden looked set for a period of political confusion after election results on Sunday put a center-right bloc and the governing center-left coalition neck and neck, while a far-right, anti-immigration party came in third — winning a higher percentage of the vote than ever before, but achieving less of a breakthrough than polls had suggested.
With more than 99 percent of ballots counted, the national election commission reported that the governing center-left Social Democrats had 28.4 percent of the vote, making it the largest single vote-getter, but handing the party its worst showing in decades.
The center-right Moderate party was next at 19.8 percent, while the far-right Sweden Democrats were running third, with 17.6 percent, up from 12.9 percent in 2014 but a less successful showing than many Swedes had feared. Some polls had predicted that the Sweden Democrats would come in second, with more than 20 percent of the vote.
The red-green bloc of center-left, leftist and environmental parties, led by the Social Democrats, had 40.6 percent of the vote. The center-right alliance, led by the Moderates, was just behind with 40.3 percent. The results mean neither bloc can command a majority in Parliament, and both have rejected the idea of any deal with the Sweden Democrats.
The campaign was unusually polarizing in a country known for seeking political consensus. The main issues were also the most contentious: immigration, crime, the welfare state and, after a summer of forest fires, the environment.
For some voters, the fierce debates were a welcome change.
“In Sweden we have been too afraid to discuss the issues,” said Anders Nilsson, 54, an I.T. engineer who voted for the Center party in Botkyrka, a diverse suburb south of Stockholm. “Now we dare to discuss tough questions.”
This election has been one of the most closely watched in Sweden’s recent history, with a focus on how the Sweden Democrats would perform given the rise of anti-immigration populist parties in countries like Germany, Italy and Austria.
“The world’s eyes are on Sweden and the path it takes,” Annie Loof, the head of the Center Party, said in a debate before the vote.
The Social Democrat prime minister, Stefan Lofven, who runs a minority government of the center-left, had warned voters on Saturday not to cast their ballots for what he called a “racist” party.
“This election is a referendum about our welfare,” he said. “It’s also about decency, about a decent democracy and not letting the Sweden Democrats, an extremist party, a racist party, get any influence in the government.”
Jimmie Akesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, told supporters on Saturday that the current government had “prioritized, during these four years, asylum-seekers,” listing failures to do more for health care, housing and pensioners. “Sweden needs breathing space,” he said. “We need tight, responsible immigration policies.”
The results on Sunday followed another recent European election pattern: the shrinking of mainstream parties of the center-left and the center-right as they lose votes to more extreme parties on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as to environmentalist parties.
In Sweden, this shift has raised questions about whether the main parties will keep their vows to have no dealings with the Sweden Democrats, or whether they will have to reach some understanding with the party, especially on crucial budget votes.
The main parties may try to negotiate some sort of grand coalition, but that would be unusual in Sweden, where minority governments are fairly common.
“This is a new situation for Sweden,” said Soren Holmberg, a political scientist who heads the SOM Institute, an independent research group at the University of Gothenburg. “What is pretty clear is that there won’t be a majority on either side, so it means we have to have a lot of negotiation between the blocs.”
About 7.5 million registered voters chose from almost 6,300 candidates for a four-year term in the 349-seat Parliament.
Arian Vassili, a 23-year-old engineering student who voted Sunday in Botkyrka, said he supported the Social Democrats. “This is an incredibly important election,” he said. “This is an election about values, how you view people, your fellow human beings and whether we are going to take care of each other.”
Maria Enberg, 42, a cook who lives in Botkyrka, said she had voted for the Center party. “The Sweden Democrats have become so big, and I really wanted to vote against them. I don’t want any racist party governing in Sweden.”
The Sweden Democrats’ rise began in 2010, when the party crossed the 4 percent threshold for Parliament seats, getting 5.7 percent of the vote. In 2014, its vote share rose to 12.9 percent, making it Sweden’s third-largest party.
The Sweden Democrats have greatly benefited since the migration wave of 2015, when 163,000 asylum seekers came to Sweden, about 1.6 percent of the population.
Under Mr. Akesson’s leadership, the party has tried to soften its image. It now uses for the party logo a floppy flower in Sweden’s colors of blue and yellow instead of a flaming torch, and the party insists that it will not tolerate racism. But it campaigned on keeping “Sweden Swedish,” cracking down on crime and questioning whether immigrants and Islam will alter the country’s identity.
As in Germany, stricter border controls have been introduced in Sweden, and the numbers of new immigrants has fallen steeply, to about 23,000 this year.
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But the political damage had been done, and despite a thriving economy and generally low unemployment, the Sweden Democrats argued that immigration should stop and that resources should go to refurbishing Sweden’s famous welfare state, which is strained by an aging population and the challenge of taking on migrants.
For those born in Sweden, the unemployment rate was 4.4. percent in 2017; for migrants, the number was 15.1 percent, according to government statistics.
During the campaign, the right-wing party spoke directly about traditionally taboo subjects like identity, Islam, integration and crime, winning supporters who felt the traditional parties had been reluctant to touch such sensitive issues. The party, along with the Left party on the other extreme, has benefited from a general sense of discontent and loss of confidence in the political system.
Li Bennich-Björkman, a political scientist at Uppsala University, said it was “sort of shocking” that the Sweden Democrats could come this far, but she noted that the party, which has disavowed its roots in the white supremacist movement, had transformed.
“I would say that the major part of their electorate are not racist and fascist,” Ms. Bennich-Björkman said. “They have managed very skillfully to transform themselves into a variant of the Social Democratic party, just with more nationalist ambitions,” she said.
The Social Democrats, who have dominated the country for a century, built Sweden’s welfare state. But their support has declined from 45 percent in 1994 to just over 28 percent on Sunday. The Left Party had 7.9 percent of the vote, and the Green Party 4.4 percent.
The Moderate party, led by Ulf Kristersson, leads the center-right bloc. He was chosen in October 2017 to head the party when his predecessor, Anna Kinberg Batra, resigned after suggesting that it might be possible to work with the Sweden Democrats. In its alliance, the Center Party won 8.6 percent of the vote, the Christian Democrats 6.4 percent and the Liberals 5.5 percent.
On Sunday night, Mr. Kristersson called on the prime minister to resign. “This government has run its course,” he told a party rally.
With the two blocs so close to each other, negotiations over forming a government are expected to be drawn out. “Usually we are quick in forming a new government,” said Mr. Holmberg, the political scientist. “This time it could drag on for weeks or months.”
Both centrist parties have moved to the right under the pressure of the Sweden Democrats and have promised tougher policies on immigration, the integration of refugees and crime.
Daniel Suhonen, the head of Katalys, a trade union research group, said he saw “very sad” parallels in the United States for the Sweden Democrats’ rise.
“They had a clear answer, like Trump,” he said at a Social Democrats event. “They said all the problems in Sweden are created by an elite that is corrupt and ruined the country with immigration, and you can see that in your bad pension, the lack of affordable housing for your adult children. They said you can solve it if you stop immigration.”
Christina Anderson reported from Stockholm and Steven Erlanger from Brussels.
The solution to Europe’s weakness is not more government programs but letting market forces work
CAMBRIDGE – In July, I joined 43 other scholars of international relations in paying for a newspaper advertisement arguing that the US should preserve the current international order. The institutions that make up this order have contributed to “unprecedented levels of prosperity and the longest period in modern history without war between major powers. US leadership helped to create this system, and US leadership has long been critical for its success.”
But some serious scholars declined to sign, not only on grounds of the political futility of such public statements, but because they disagreed with the “bipartisan US commitment to ‘liberal hegemony’ and the fetishization of ‘US leadership’ on which it rests.” Critics correctly pointed out that the American order after 1945 was neither global nor always very liberal, while defenders replied that while the order was imperfect, it produced unparalleled economic growth and allowed the spread of democracy.
Such debates are unlikely to have much effect on President Donald Trump, who proclaimed in his inaugural address that, “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America First, America First […] We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world – but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”
But Trump went on to say that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example.” And he did have a point. This approach can be called the “city on the hill” tradition, and it has a long pedigree. It is not pure isolationism, but it eschews activism in pursuit of values. American power is, instead, seen as resting on the “pillar of inspiration” rather than the “pillar of action.” For example, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously proclaimed on Independence Day in 1821 that the United States “does goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
But the soft power of inspiration is not the only ethical tradition in American foreign policy. There is also an interventionist and crusading tradition. Adams’s speech was an effort to fend off political pressure from those who wanted the US to intervene on behalf of Greek patriots rebelling against Ottoman oppression.
That tradition prevailed in the twentieth century, when Woodrow Wilson sought a foreign policy that would make the world safe for democracy. At mid-century, John F. Kennedy called for Americans to make the world safe for diversity, but he also sent 17,000 American military advisers to Vietnam. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has been involved in seven wars and military interventions, and in 2006, after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush issued a National Security Strategy that was almost the opposite of Trump’s, promoting freedom and a global community of democracies.
Americans often see their country as exceptional, and most recently President Barack Obama described himself a strong proponent of American exceptionalism. There are sound analytical reasons to believe that if the largest economy does not take the lead in providing global public goods, such goods – from which all can benefit – will be under-produced. That is one source of American exceptionalism.
Economic size makes the US different, but analysts like Daniel H. Deudney of Johns Hopkins University and Jeffrey W. Meiser of the University of Portland argue that the core reason that the US is widely viewed as exceptional is its intensely liberal character and an ideological vision of a way of life centered on political, economic, and social freedom.
Of course, right from the start, America’s liberal ideology had internal contradictions, with slavery written into its constitution. And Americans have always differed over how to promote liberal values in foreign policy. According to Deudney and Meiser,
“For some Americans, particularly recent neo-conservatives, intoxicated with power and righteousness, American exceptionalism is a green light, a legitimizing rationale, and an all-purpose excuse for ignoring international law and world public opinion, for invading other countries and imposing governments […] For others, American exceptionalism is code for the liberal internationalist aspiration for a world made free and peaceful not through the assertion of unchecked American power and influence, but rather through the erection of a system of international law and organization that protects domestic liberty by moderating international anarchy.”
Protected by two oceans, and bordered by weaker neighbors, the US largely focused on westward expansion in the nineteenth century and tried to avoid entanglement in the struggle for power then taking place in Europe. Otherwise, warned Adams, “The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power.”
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, America had replaced Britain as the world’s largest economy, and its intervention in World War I tipped the balance of power. And yet by the 1930s, many Americans had come to believe that intervention in Europe had been a mistake and embraced isolationism. After World War II, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – and others around the world – drew the lesson that the US could not afford to turn inward again.
Together, they created a system of security alliances, multilateral institutions, and relatively open economic policies that comprise Pax Americana or the “liberal international order.” Whatever one calls these arrangements, for 70 years it has been US foreign policy to defend them. Today, they are being called into question by the rise of powers such as China and a new wave of populism within the world’s democracies, which Trump tapped in 2016, when he became the first candidate of a major US political party to call into question the post-1945 international order.
The question for a post-Trump president is whether the US can successfully address both aspects of its exceptional role. Can the next president promote democratic values without military intervention and crusades, and at the same time take a non-hegemonic lead in establishing and maintaining the institutions needed for a world of interdependence?