Good News: Sweden Democrats support hits three year low in new poll

[Celerity]

Support for the populist Sweden Democrats is at its lowest point in three years, while the Green Party is back above the four percent threshold for entering parliament, according to a new poll.

https://www.thelocal.se/20220427/sweden-democrats-see-lowest-support-in-three-years-in-new-poll/


Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson has said his party has shifted position over Nato membership. Photo: TT

According to the poll, carried out by Ipsos for Dagens Nyheter, the share of respondents who said they would vote for the far-right party fell from 19 percent in March to 18 percent in April, putting it more or less in line with the 17.5 percent share of the vote it won in the 2018 election.

The share who said they would vote Green rose from three percent to four percent. The biggest fall, however, was for the Social Democrats, who fell from the 33 percent high they saw in March in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, back to 30 percent in April.

“Right now there’s a big focus on the Nato issue and the Social Democrats’ positioning, which can impact on support for S [the Social Democrats],” Nicklas Källebring, an opinions analyst for Ipsos, told DN. “Among the party’s voters, there are people who oppose Swedish membership.” The Green Party, which has so far shown a stronger opposition to Nato membership, may be picking up some of those votes.

Källebring also believes that the the riots over the Easter weekend will have seen voters shift support from the Social Democrats to the Moderates and Sweden Democrats, drawn by their tougher messaging on crime. The Liberal Party has also seen its support grow from closer to two percent to three percent, perhaps as a result of its new leader Johan Pehrson. The Moderate Party's share of the vote stayed the same at 22 percent.

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[speak easy]

1. To the extent there is a story here (it's all within the MOE)

I would have thought it was the fall in support for the Social Democrats (10% of their vote).

[secondwind]

2. Why are they against NATO membership.....

[DFW]

3. Sweden has been non-aligned almost since it was separated from Norway over a century ago.

The Social Democrats were practically a "we-own-the-place" party for decades after the incident at Ådalen in 1931. Even during the Second World War, they remained "neutral," although only by allowing the Germans to use their railways to get to their installations in occupied Norway. There was never much support in Sweden for giving up its neutrality, even after a Soviet submarine spying on them ran aground after getting too close to the rocky Swedish coastline in the 1980s. Even after the Russians annexed the Baltic states into the Soviet Union in 1940, Sweden remained neutral. It took a really drastic move (like, for example, bombing the hell out of a peaceful neighboring country that had no intention of menacing Russia) to make Sweden and Finland even whisper about joining NATO.