In tweets, interviews, one article in the Aftonbladet tabloid and a second one in Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson outlined his party's new tougher position, with calls for mandatory referendums on extensions of EU powers, an analysis of how to reduce the negative impacts of EU membership, and, finally, cautionary preparations to leave.
For Manners, a political scientist and EU expert, this is all about repositioning the party:
- He's caught in a very difficult position in that he's effectively in a governing coalition, although they're not in government, and they have no clear anti-system position, because they are in effect part of the ruling coalition in some strange way.
- However, the risks of the new policy gambit were at least as big as the potential benefits, Manners argued, with few supporting the proposed ideas even within the Sweden Democrats:
I think actually it will quite possibly backfire. If you look at some of the dog whistle sentences in the article in Aftonbladet, one is, 'we need to evaluate our membership of the EU'. Well, there's literally no support for that.
A recent survey of Swedish voters, carried out by the SOM Institute at Gothenburg University, found that support for EU membership was higher today than at any time since Sweden joined the EU in 1994, with 68 percent of voters in favour and only 11 percent against. This was even the case for Sweden Democrat voters, a full 43 percent of whom said they were "essentially in favour" of Swedish EU membership, up from 23 percent as recently as 2021. Only 31 percent of Sweden Democrats said they were "essentially against" EU membership.
The place that Swexit would really hurt is down here in the south of Sweden, Manners said, based in Lund.
Imagine all the agriculture and the small and medium-sized industries in Skåne. Imagine all the transport and commuters, all the jobs that are dependent on flowing across the bridge. It's going to get hurt twice as bad as the rest of Sweden. And this is the base for the Sweden Democrats.
Manners mentioned the long queues of trucks you would expect ahead of the Öresund Bridge, the likely impact on the krona, or the impact on the big investment decisions currently being made in the north of Sweden in car battery manufacturing or Green Steel. Even having the debate or putting in place the inquiries Åkesson was proposing could risk these investments or affect the currency, said Manners.
- Countries do need to have a discussion about what it might potentially mean to leave the EU, so that there is a far greater awareness of the heightened risks, he said. Because we never had that discussion in the UK.
INTERVIEW: 'How best to respond to the Sweden Democrats' Swexit gambit', Richard Orange, The Local, 24th May 2023 - https://www.thelocal.se/20230524/interview-how-best-to-respond-to-the-sweden-democrats-swexit-gambit
Ian Manners research profile: https://www.svet.lu.se/en/ian-manners