September 25, 2022

Far-right Sweden Democrats’ victory is a loss for the climate

topic:	Climate Change
located:	Sweden
editor:	Abby Klinkenberg

On 11 September, Sweden became Europe’s latest government to yield to the influence of far-right populism. The ultra-nationalist Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots, earned 20.5 percent of the vote in the Swedish General Election - enough to rise to the second-largest party in Parliament (Riksdagen). While the centre-right could technically construct a ruling coalition government without including the Sweden Democrats, the party “will have significant leverage in any centre-right government.” And that is a scary thought: not only are the Sweden Democrats blatantly xenophobic and anti-immigrant, they are also poised to bend the country’s climate policy in a problematic direction.

Lest we forget, the Sweden Democrats were the only Swedish party that opposed the ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2016. Having made considerable progress towards realising the ambition to be net-zero by 2045, Sweden’s climate trajectory is set to shift significantly under the Sweden Democrats’ influence.

While the storied history of the Sweden Democrats’ affinity with white supremacist ideology has been well chronicled, the party’s climate-skeptic and ignorant environmental policy has received comparatively little attention. Amidst the crushingly hot summer of 2018 that nearly starved the country’s entire reindeer population, Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson said, “to make politics out of one summer’s weather is simply not serious, it is the worst sort of populism.” Beyond the clear irony of a populist condemning climate change concern as populist sentiment, Åkesson’s assertion that climate change is a political issue smacks of denialism. The party’s proposed 2022 budget reflects this same perspective by referencing the supposedly ‘lively’ debate among researchers about “the consequences of different levels of temperature increase.” Consequently, the Sweden Democrats ultimately view climate change as “an unclear situation.”

Underpinned by this sense of ambiguity, the Sweden Democrats do not view investment in the climate as worthwhile. In their 2022 spending proposal, they slash funding for ‘general environmental and nature conservation’ by 41 percent, from 21.9 billion Swedish kroner to 12.8 billion. The party repeatedly emphasises the comparatively small role that Sweden plays in global greenhouse gas emissions and essentially divests itself of responsibility to play an active role in combating climate change. As part of their recent lecture series slanderously entitled ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ two rising stars in the Sweden Democrats, Jessica Stegrud and Elsa Widding, insisted that Sweden is not responsible for climate change: “it’s not like we in Sweden are influencing the climate.” Rather, they referred to the racist tactic of placing blame on high birth rates in developing countries.

The Sweden Democrats’ budget further indicates that “all environmental and climate policy must be conducted within the framework of economic conditions.” They propose investing in technology to innovate our way out of the crisis and insist in their Election Platform 2022 that “Sweden can contribute to reducing emissions by increasing exports.” Doubling down on the twin fallacies that tech will solve climate change and that somehow the environmental crisis can be untethered from capitalism, the Sweden Democrats’ environmental playbook is plagued with shoddy logic.  

That the Sweden Democrats now wield significant power poses a problem for Sweden’s net-zero ambitions, to put it mildly. While the country’s next governing coalition is yet to be solidified, it is clear that climate activists will have to contend with significant pushback in the Riksdagen.

Image by Photo by Geran de Klerk

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