Forget Park51. Today was the Swedish election, and a party called Sverigedemokraterna (SD) is dangerously close to the coveted spot between two coalitions, neither of which has a majority in parliament alone. This position might be unfamiliar to you if you’re accustomed to a two-party system, but it’s basically what happened in this year’s British elections: neither of the two big parties, or in Sweden’s case, the two big coalitions, could form a majority government alone. This, obviously, gives disproportionate influence to the third party that can decide in which direction it wants to push the majority.
The dangerous thing about SD is that it’s a rabidly xenophobic party, which is unsurprising given its past (until 15 years ago, it was literally a bunch of neo-Nazis and their sympathizers). Their political program states that “no religious building whose architecture is foreign to the Swedish building tradition shall be permitted to be built.” In other words, no mosques, synagogues, Buddhist temples, or any other religious building anywhere in the entire country, unless they disguise themselves as regular buildings and erase every trace of their function or origin from their facades. That should give you a taste of their immigration policy, whose racism is so close to the surface it makes me sick.
Hopefully it works out for the Swedes in a way that gives minimal influence to SD.
I guess my point with this post is this: none of us know how to live with each other. How we meet the other, in practice the muslim, is a problem that affects the entire West. Neither the United States nor the supposedly progressive Scandinavia knows how to treat others well and also appease those who fear losing themselves. Perhaps it can’t be done. Perhaps it’s come to a point where xenophobes can just go fuck themselves — if only that position were politically feasible. Here in Norway, the anti-immigration Progress Party, not as extreme as SD but still given to racist outbursts, hovers around 20 percent and might well be governing the country as one part of a coalition by 2013.
Fuckin’ immigration, how does it work?
Sep 20, 2010