The Shifting Image of Sweden Abroad: Framings of the 2022 Swedish Election in Traditional and Far-Right Online Media from the United States, Germany, India, and China

Abstract

The 2022 Swedish election saw a radical-right populist party—the Sweden Democrats—gain direct government influence in the country for the first time. This contrasted with the international image of Sweden as a progressive county yet resonated with the country’s growing ideological use by foreign far-right actors. This article analyzes the framing of Sweden’s image in traditional and far-right online media from the United States, Germany, India, and China during this election. It explores to what extent and when Sweden gained online media attention and how the election was framed across these countries and media types.

Introduction

The 2022 Swedish election led to a new right-wing coalition government that replaced a center-left minority coalition involving the Social Democratic Party (S) and Green Party which had governed since 2014.¹ To a degree, this shift to the right followed the flip-flop pattern of twenty-first century Swedish politics insofar as a center-right coalition governed from 2006 until 2014 after displacing a Social Democratic-led government that had held power since 1994. The 2022 election, however, represented an extenuation of this pattern insofar as it led to a radical-right populist party—the Sweden Democrats (SD)—gaining direct government influence for the first time.

SD entered parliament in 2010 and, after gains in every election since, received the second largest vote share in 2022 (after S)—an election that differed from those earlier because it was predominantly “fought over the right’s issues.”² SD’s past neo-Nazi associations had previously meant the country’s center-right parties excluded it from coalitions. But now SD’s popularity, highlighted by an increase in vote share that exceeded S (up 3% vs up 2%), could not be ignored and the third-largest party, the Moderate Party, broke the “cordon sanitaire” by forming a minority government (with the Christian Democrats and the Liberals) that was reliant on a confidence-and-supply agreement with SD.³ Although this did not cede ministerial posts to SD, the party’s growing political influence contrasts with the long-standing international image of Sweden as a model of progressive politics. At the same time, it resonates with the growing use of Sweden’s image among foreign far-right actors.⁴

In this article we analyze how the image of Sweden was framed in traditional and far-right online foreign media (including websites and social media channels) around the time of the election between 1 September and 30 October 2022. We focus on four countries: the United States (US), Germany, India, and China. We ask:

1. To what extent and when did Sweden gain online media attention in the US, Germany, India, and China between 1 September and 30 October 2022?

2. How was Sweden and its election framed in traditional and far-right online media in these countries during this period?

Framing Sweden abroad online: country image, radicalization and elections

Internationally, Sweden has often been framed as a utopian and ultra-modern country and progressive and prosperous welfare state.⁵ This is the case even as its welfare state has experienced recurrent challenges. Schall⁶ has highlighted how the Swedish welfare state has faced various moments of crisis linked to different waves and forms of immigration with consequence for the country’s actual or perceived ethnic homogeneity and self-conception. Still, during the twentieth century Sweden’s international image was shaped by three chiefly positive frames: “the social laboratory” (1920s), the “middle way” (1930s) and “the Swedish model” (1960s).⁷ At times, these frames were cast in a more negative light by international actors. This was the case, for example, during the Cold War when “the Swedish model,” was considered a little too close to Communism for the US government’s liking.⁸ Since the 1990s Sweden’s international image has been reframed due to neoliberal globalization.⁹ Alongside this, further negative international framings of Sweden have arose with regards growing racism and far-right extremism as linked to new forms of immigration.¹⁰

More recently, after 2015, Sweden’s image has once again been reframed. This time, due to its response to the so-called “European refugee crisis,” Islamic terror attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic.¹¹ For instance, from 2015 Sweden was increasingly associated with “migration policies and refugee intake, coupled to violence and disorder” and again framed as “in crisis.”¹² While this image may have rescinded somewhat in foreign traditional media, it has persisted longer on social media,¹³ suggesting the influential role that online media now plays in framing the country’s image abroad. However, the framing of Sweden’s image abroad has mostly be analyzed via broadcast and printed press.¹⁴ The country and the wider Nordic region have been conceived as “mediated” but the international framing of Sweden’s image has rarely been explored as digitally mediated nor with respect to the radicalizing tendencies of digitally-active foreign far-right actors.

Such actors have long viewed Sweden as the quintessential left-wing state and used it within their racist ideologies by emphasizing its supposed racial homogeneity, equating Swedishness with whiteness and connecting the erosion of the Swedish welfare state to negligent immigration policies.¹⁵ Nowadays legitimate digital news stories from and about Sweden, especially negative ones, have become an ideological commodity among US far-right actors who turn them toward their political goals and the country now features regularly on US far-right websites as both a role model and cautionary tale.¹⁶ Relatedly, evidence shows that foreign far-right actors carried out online smear campaigns against Sweden during its 2018 election.¹⁷ On Twitter that election became digitally “deterritorialised,” taking on “real or perceived stakes for audiences elsewhere” with Sweden becoming “a symbol of the threats facing the entire Western world.”¹⁸

In this article, we conceptually approach national elections as not only deterritorialized media events but also globally significant image events with consequences for how the country in question is framed abroad. We thus stress the commonly accepted but rarely stated capacity of elections to amplify international attention toward the country holding them. With this, there are opportunities to study the more pronounced foreign media framing of such countries. Following other studies of the international image of various countries,¹⁹ we also use the concept of media framing. Media framing, both unconscious and intentional, involves the selection of certain aspects of a perceived reality so to increase their saliency within a media text and shape the readers’ views of that reality.²⁰

The foreign media framing of countries is important because it not only influences interactions between countries but also foreign policy and public opinion with a bearing on, for example, forms of soft power including nation branding.²¹ This is connected to the fact that, more generally, “media constitute the most important source of information about politics and society writ large” and the content of traditional versus alternative media (including far-right media) can thus influence the health of established democracies and common attitudes toward such things as immigration.²²

The Swedish Institute (SI), the government agency tasked with promoting and branding Sweden and Swedish culture abroad, acknowledges that elections are key moments in which the image of the country is framed abroad. SI have analyzed the international news reporting and social media reception of Sweden’s last two elections. It found the 2018 election’s international news impact was similar to that of Sweden’s participation in the Eurovision song contest but less than its involvement in the football World Cup. The social media discussion of the 2018 election, meanwhile was five times larger than the 2014 election although still limited.²³ SI have since shown that international attention to Swedish elections grew in 2022 and that foreign discussion of that election was dominated by the topic of crime, specifically gang crime as linked to immigration.²⁴

Methodology: a collaborative scalable reading

We analyzed mentions and framings of “Sweden” in articles and posts published on US, German, Indian and Chinese traditional and far-right online media between 1 September and 30 October 2022—a period including the election day (11 September) and the drawn-out processes that led to the official formation of the new government (17 October). This analysis involved a collaborative “scalable reading”²⁵ relying on both distant and close reading techniques. These four countries were chosen to broaden research on the image of Sweden among the foreign far-right beyond just the US and to reflect a wider cross-section of publics and global powers with different political regime types and media systems.²⁶

First, we used MediaCloud, an open-source media analysis platform (https://mediacloud.org/), to gain an overview of online media attention to Sweden across the four countries. We searched for mentions of “Sweden” in English, and its German (“Schweden”), Hindi (“स्वीडन”) and Mandarin (“瑞典”) translations in MediaCloud’s “national collections” for each country. Although the number of sources in these collections differed (US = 259; Germany = 63; India = 134; China = 236) and sources have different activity levels, this provided a general baseline for online media attention to Sweden in these countries.

Different members of the author team then conducted close readings of selected online traditional and far-right media sources in each of the four countries (Table 1). These sources were sampled differently but with the consistent use of the “Sweden” search term. While the “far-right” label varies in applicability and specificity across the four countries and is most complicated in China,²⁷ we use it in a sensitizing manner,²⁸ conceiving it in terms of ultranationalism and xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment. It should be noted throughout the following analysis that far-right groups differ considerably across each of the countries and our use of the label in a sensitizing manner does not intend to suggest their equation. The selected far-right online media sources were also context-specific, reflecting the applicability of the “far-right” label in each country. Not all are explicitly far-right, but sources where far-right perspectives were expected to be common. This explains the variation in the scale of the far-right online media sources used. While we more consistently sampled two traditional online media for each country (except for China), it proved difficult to balance eligible far-right online media sources. This somewhat limits our findings but is also constitutive of them insofar as illustrating imbalances in global far-right attention to Sweden. Ultimately, we deemed these quantitative differences acceptable given our primary qualitative interest in the character (rather than extent) of the foreign framing of Sweden. Any examples reproduced as part of the close readings that were not originally in English have been translated by members of the author team.

Table 1. The media sources used for the close reading.

	Traditional Online Media		Far-right Online Media
Case Country	Sources (Sweden mentioned in)	Collection Method	Sources (Sweden mentioned in)	Collection Method
USA	New York Post; USA TODAY	Retriever Media Database*	American Far-Right Websites***	Manual Website Searches
	(33 articles)		(83 articles)
Germany	Spiegel, Tagesschau	MediaCloud Media Database**	German Far-Right Telegram Channels and Groups	Python and Telegram’s API****
	(135 articles)		(5323 posts)
India	Republic TV, Times of India	Manual Website Searches	Organizer	Manual Website Searches
	(44 articles)		(1 article)
China	People’s Daily	Manual Website Searches	Guancha.cn	Manual Website Searches
	(30 articles)		(6 articles)

Distant reading: an election drowned out?

Figure 1 shows mentions of Sweden in the MediaCloud national collections with the dates of the election (11 September) and government formation (17 October) marked. It suggests the levels of interest in Sweden across the four countries. In actual mentions, this interest was the most manifest in the US (3,355 mentions, 13 per source) and Germany (2,261 mentions, 36 per source) followed by India (1,348 mentions, 10 per source) and China (127, 0.5 per source). It also shows that Sweden’s discussion in these countries’ online media was not restricted to nor dominated by the election and its outcome. Peaks in mentions around these events are comparable to or smaller than others. These other peaks relate to events associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its geopolitical consequences for Sweden as part of “the West.” For instance, the peaks in US, German and Indian media mentions from late September to early October reflect news of the release of ten foreign prisoners by Russian separatists (including some from the US and Sweden), the apparent sabotage of the NordStream gas pipelines in international waters close to Sweden, as well as Sweden’s plans to join NATO. The peaks from 3 to 7 October relate to the Nobel Prize announcements.

Figure 1. Mentions of Sweden in MediaCloud’s US, Germany, India, and China National Collections (1 September–30 October 2022).

On the day of and after the election (11 and 12 September), there were a similar number of Sweden mentions in the US (112) and German (111) national collections despite the latter having fewer sources. The headlines of the articles containing these mentions further suggest that the German media was more interested in the Swedish election than its US counterpart. Just over half of the German headlines (64/111) related to the election whereas this was the case for only around a quarter of the US headlines (27/112). Eleven of 29 headlines from the India national collection addressed the election on these two days and just two of six headlines did so in the Chinese national collection. On the day of and after the confirmation of the new government there were more mentions of Sweden in the US (147) than German (122) national collection but very few directly related to the new government and its immediate actions (13/147). The German online media mentioned Sweden during these days more often in relation to the new government and its actions (27/122). These mentions focussed on Sweden’s new Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson and Climate and Enterprise minister Romina Pourmokhtari, as well as the cancelation of its feminist approach to foreign policy. Again, there were fewer mentions of Sweden and its election during these two days in the collections from India (13/70) and China (1/5).

Although we do not wish to attribute too much significance to the distant reading alone, it does provide important context for the close reading in suggesting that the 2022 Swedish election received the most detailed and extended coverage in German online media followed by that of the US and to a lesser extent that of India and China. This is unsurprising given that of the four, Germany is Sweden’s closest European neighbor and shares more similarities in its political social, and cultural character. The distant reading also highlights that foreign online media attention to the Swedish election, as with previous elections,²⁹ centered on the election day but also the later official formation of the country’s new government. Besides this, online media coverage of Sweden in the four countries around this time mostly related to the impact on the country of geopolitical events relating to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ultimately, international coverage of the election seems to have been drowned out by other matters considered to be of more pressing global importance.

Close readings: Sweden’s election in US, German, Indian, and Chinese online media

The US: a European trend and populist talking points

Five online articles related to Sweden from the conservative tabloid New York Post and the center-left daily USA Today discussed the election. The NordStream gas leaks featured in six articles and the Nobel prize in three. Further indicating these media sources’ relative indifference to the election, two articles also featured the escape of a snake from a Swedish zoo. Furthermore, the Swedish election was not the sole focus of any of the articles that discussed it and none of these were published on or around the election day or the official announcement of the government. Instead, the election was discussed in passing and usually in a neutral way that emphasized SD gains (even if these only exceeded S gains in percentage increase and not votes themselves) and the party’s anti-crime and anti-immigration agenda. Three of the articles did this to support claims regarding a European-wide political shift to the right amid growing concern about immigration and crime, and to contextualize the victory of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party in the Italian national election on 25 September 2023. In short, these articles did not so much use the election to frame Sweden’s image as that of Europe and the European Union (EU). One stated:

Meloni’s willingness to highlight and discuss a topic that causes significant popular unease was key to her success. It was the same story in Sweden; the controversial Sweden Democrats became the country’s largest right-wing party by running on a promise to combat crime by significantly tightening immigration laws, responding to social problems others were unwilling to tackle head-on. (New York Post, 3 October)³⁰

An editorial compilation followed a similar pattern but was more vitriolic, citing a separate analysis of the election from the right-libertarian British internet magazine Spiked:

That the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing nationalist party that’s anti-immigrant and anti-Islam, won a fifth of the vote in last week’s parliamentary elections “has shaken . . . liberal elites around the world,” smirks Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill. “They seem to be clocking, finally, that their cultural and political values are not safe anywhere. Not even in Sweden.” Yes, the party has “disturbing origins,” but its largely blue-collar voters aren’t in revolt “because they’re racist,” but in rejection of “an establishment that seems to be in wilful denial about the problems confronting society, and which will brand you a hateful bigot if you dare to raise those problems.”…the establishment refused “to talk about Sweden’s transformation from a relatively stable welfare-oriented society into a nation beset by gang violence and identitarian grievance.”³¹

This editorial was reminiscent of the discussion of the election on the sampled far-right websites. On the US far-right websites, Sweden was discussed in relation to a range of issues, including again the NordStream leaks but also immigration, violent crime, and energy security.³² Still the largest share concerned the election (37 articles), contrasting with the US traditional online media’s relative lack of coverage. The two media types also contrasted in terms of the timing of their discussion of the election and Sweden more generally. On the US far-right websites the discussion of violent and sexual crime in Sweden was prevalent in the build-up to the election and to a lesser extent, thereafter—exemplified by reference to Sweden as Europe “rape capital.”³³ The discussion of Sweden’s immigration policy mirrored this. It was evident before the election but more dominant after it. Notably, the Swedish election was discussed recurrently on these media throughout the sample period, with peaks around the election day and the announcement of the government. In short, the US far-right online media displayed a more sustained (albeit still modest) interest in the Swedish elections than their traditional counterparts.

The articles on the Swedish election from the US far-right online media sources confirm earlier research³⁴ because, although sometimes composed of original content, they also often selectively reproduced politically compatible content from traditional media. Overall, they were animated by multiple frames of which several also featured to some extent in the US traditional online media. Firstly, early in their election coverage and given the closeness of the vote they often emphasized the uncertainty surrounding the result and framed the election as “too-close-to-call.”³⁵ Interestingly while the discussion of election fraud was prevalent throughout the 2018 election³⁶ it was only explicitly mentioned once in our sample before the election.³⁷ We might speculate that, had a narrow victory for the left bloc been announced, an election fraud frame may have been more fully adopted within the US far-right online media.³⁸ One Breitbart article that reported on the earliest predictions of the election’s outcome was entitled: Fix Is In? Mail-In and Overseas Votes Could Overturn Right’s Narrow Lead in Swedish Election. It used SD’s gains to frame the party as the election’s “biggest winners,” regardless of what the overall outcome would be. ³⁹

As it transpired, the right bloc’s victory rendered election fraud a moot point. Focussing on the SD and its gains, the US far-right online media emphasized the party’s shifting status from a political pariah to kingmaker while downplaying its neo-Nazi associations and contemporary hate speech controversies. The Drudge Report recurrently did this by using favorable news agency coverage (including Associated Press (AP) and others) to normalize SD as a regular right-wing party like any other.⁴⁰

As the new government was announced, some of the US far-right online media sources more explicitly employed a populist frame to stress how the election results would benefit “the people.”

As of Monday October 17, 2022, there was a new government in Sweden. It is a government of the kind that the Nordic country hasn’t experienced for a very long time. If it’s telling the truth in its “policy agenda,” it aims to actually help the Swedish people—a people who have watched mass Islamic immigration transform their country from one of the safest to the most dangerous country in Europe in just a few decades.⁴¹

Globalists have implemented policies that endanger Western societies and culture, and smear anyone who advocates for the protection of free societies as “racist,” “fascist,” “Islamophobic” and the like. In Sweden, however, the public is beginning to wake up.⁴²

These articles indexed the image of Sweden, commonly communicated by US far-right actors,⁴³ as, in the words of one example, “a notoriously Leftist country” whose political course is in urgent need of correction given an increase in violent and sexual crime attributed to non-European immigration. As the Italian election results coalesced with Sweden’s, swelling the perceived shift in the European political tide, one article from the US far-right online media sources, also considered whether these results might be indicators for the outcome of the 2022 US Mid-terms.

Earlier this month, the people of Sweden—a nation long misruled by the left—repudiated their elites and voted for a government dominated by the right’s Swedish Democrats. Yesterday, a similar political earthquake brought to power in Italy a right-wing coalition […] For us, the question is: To what extent are such sentiments next going to dominate our elections this fall? (Center for Security Policy, 26 September)⁴⁴

The framing of Sweden’s, and indeed the EU’s, image via the Swedish elections in the US far-right online media, thus clearly served these media’s political agenda.

Germany: consistent coverage and conspiracy theories

From Germany, the public broadcaster Tagesschau and the center left Der Spiegel mentioned Sweden in 135 online articles during the sample period, already suggesting how they paid greater attention to Sweden than their sampled US counterparts. However, the discussion of Sweden mostly followed a similar pattern across the two countries. Again, non-election coverage was dominated by discussion of the NordStream leaks, the Nobel prizes, and the war in Ukraine and/or NATO membership. Still, contrasting with the US traditional online media where the election was never the sole focus of any article, the greatest number of these German articles (32) discussed the Swedish election directly. Five articles were published before election day indicating that the interest in the election shown by these German traditional online media was not only larger than their sampled US counterparts but chronologically extenuated. They not only reactively framed the election but anticipated it and speculated about its result in advance. Of these articles, two mentioned the threat of Russian disinformation campaigns, two reported fears of a political swing to the right and one discussed rising gun violence as a “Swedish epidemic.”⁴⁵

While there was more coverage around election day, the coalition-building that followed thereafter also received considerable attention, with articles dedicated to Magdalena Andersson’s Prime Ministerial resignation, and Kristersson’s formation of a new government, as well as explainer pieces about SD and a vox pop-style article covering local reactions to the results in Stockholm. As in the US, Meloni’s Italian election victory led to another spike in Swedish election mentions. Several articles that discussed Sweden in the context of the Italian elections also quoted members of the radical right populist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD). These argued that a swing to the right in Italy and in Sweden isolated and marked as obsolete the German left-leaning government.

“We’re celebrating with Italy!” explained Beatrix von Storch, an AfD MP, on Twitter late on Sunday evening. Referring to the recent elections in Sweden, in which the right was also successful, she went on to write: “Sweden in the north, Italy in the south: left-wing governments are so yesterday.”⁴⁶

Before and after the confirmation of Kristersson as prime minister, coverage frequently stressed the decisive role of SD in bringing about a new government. For instance, the Der Spiegel headline of the above cited article read: New Swedish government relies on support of right-wing populists. Mirroring German online media more generally, the last Swedish election articles published by Tagesschau and Der Spiegel within the sample period (18 October) did so in connection with Pourmokhtari’s new ministerial role and the end of the country’s feminist foreign policy.

The discussion of the Swedish election differed in the sampled German far-right Telegram channels. Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, Telegram emerged as a central digital platform for large parts of the German far right. Today it supports an ecosystem of thousands of different channels and groups, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of followers/members where far-right ideology has come to overlap with conspiracy theories and Covid-19 protest.⁴⁷ Searching the content of a large collection of German far-right Telegram channels and groups amassed for broader research purposes⁴⁸ for the sample period returned 5,323 posts that mentioned Sweden across 769 channels and groups. Many of these posts referred to Sweden’s response to geo-political events like the Covid-19 pandemic, energy crisis, and NordStream leaks. But the discussion of the election was also notable, seemingly accounting for peaks in the mentioning of Sweden around election day but also, again, during the Italian election.

Contributors to German far-right Telegram channels and groups again framed the Swedish and Italian election results but also those of the French elections held in April 2022 as indicative of a European rightward political shift expected to have consequences for the strength of the EU and Germany’s liberal parties and politicians.

The results from Sweden, France and Italy are a clear indication that citizens want to be heard.

Also continuing the trend displayed in many of the other media sources already discussed, a series of election-related posts linked SD’s strong election performance specifically to growing societal concerns about non-European immigration. As some of the extracts below indicate, in these posts SD’s victory is amplified by the general far-right framing of Sweden as a flagship of liberal democracy, characterized by over generous immigration policies.

Sweden has even greater problems with mass migration than Germany

Sweden, the former showcase state of do-gooders, has FINALLY woken up!

The party “Nyans” “The New” has over 30% in migrant neighbourhoods like Rosengard. […] In Malmö, the Muslim Party, which advocates immigration and Islamization, could even enter parliament! If the Swedes do not stop the population exchange, the future belongs to the “new ones.”

Comparing these extracts with content from the US far-right websites exemplifies how Sweden’s election played into established transnational far-right frames about previously ignorant electorates “waking up” and becoming aware of concerns long expressed by far-right parties and movements. Reference to “Nyans,” the Swedish name of the Nuance Party—a new party that sought to represent the country’s minority Muslim population, shows an increased regional sensitivity that is arguably less applicable to the US where the main origins of non-Western immigrants are not Islamic countries.⁴⁹ In this extract, “Nyans” is mistranslated to mean “the New” playing on far-right fears of non-Western or non-European immigrants with newly gained European citizenship including so-called “new Swedes” and thus connecting the party to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.⁵⁰

Other German far-right Telegram posts connected the Swedish election to another far-right conspiracy theory which postulates that the post-pandemic economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is a cover for the creation of a totalitarian world government. Anti-globalist in character, some of these posts alleged a connection between the new Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson and WEF and suggested that even European radical right populist parties are controlled by the WEF elite. Others however, predicted that the election result would lead to Sweden’s exit from WEF’s 2030 agenda and celebrated this as a blow for globalism:

…whether Sweden or Italy, AfD or wherever, the FAKE-RIGHT are WEF ass-kissers

Sweden is the first European country to say goodbye to the 2030 Agenda. Globalism loses one of its most emblematic countries.

India: syndicate reporting and far-right silence

Republic TV, India’s right-wing and most popular television channel, and Times of India, the country’s centrist and best-selling national daily, each published 22 articles that mentioned “Sweden” during the sample period. Generally, these articles covered the same sorts of topics discussed in the US and German traditional media (the election, NordStream, NATO, the Nobel prizes, the snake escape) alongside some India-specific stories. The election was the most discussed topic but was only the focus of seven articles in both media sources. Although the content of these articles differed across the two media sources, their quantitative commonalities seem to have been partly caused by the way this content was sourced. Nearly all of them were un-edited syndicate feeds from AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) and thus these sources often echoed US and European reporting. Comparing the two however, reveals Republic TV’s reliance on more sympathetic syndicated coverage of SD in line with its political orientation and support of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For instance, in common with some of the US far-right blog posts discussed above, SD’s neo-Nazi roots and racist associations were downplayed, and its own talking-points amplified:

The populist party was founded by far-right extremists decades ago, but in recent years has worked hard to change its image. For many years, voters viewed it as unacceptable and other parties shunned it. That is changing…Tobias Andersson, a 26-year-old member of parliament for the Sweden Democrats seeking a second term, said his party is being unfairly characterized as racist by opponents because it serves their interests…He said that other parties who have accused the Sweden Democrats as racist are now “pushing forward the same policies themselves.”⁵¹

Meanwhile the syndicated coverage of the Times of India emphasized the closeness of the contest and the perspective of SD’s opposing parties via these parties’ supporters:

At a voting station set up in Stockholm’s Central Station, 34-year-old IT worker Erwing Marklund said he was concerned about the rise of the far right and had voted for the small Left Party. “It’s important to not get the far right into the system,” he told AFP.⁵²

Embedded within a detailed historical analysis of the SD’s growth and commentary that did not avoid issues of immigration and crime, passages like this aligned with the conception of Sweden as a left-wing country where far-right electoral success would be exceptional. Once this success was confirmed, The Times of India also published an opinion piece by an Indian journalist which offered a uniquely Indian perspective on the election.

IKEA, the home furnishing company, has become an instant hit in India… While this global Swedish behemoth has been redesigning Indian homes…, there has been some radical reorganisation of the political space in its home country…To bring an Indian audience up to speed as to who Sweden Democrats (SD) are, one need not get into elaborate details of their troubled past or turbulent present. It would suffice to say that they have demanded a ban on halal meat in Swedish schools…A party leader even reasoned that halal meat had ‘magical powers’ that could turn those who consume it into a Muslim…It was reported that Jimmie Akesson, the party’s leader, adapted the Trump slogan by saying, “Make Sweden Great Again”…. There was more Trump during the election campaign. A spokesperson of SD tweeted a picture of a train, called it “Repatriation Express” with a xenophobic message: “Here’s a one-way ticket. Next stop Kabul.” Something not very unfamiliar in India where progressives, opposition leaders and the Muslim minority are routinely asked to go away to Pakistan. ⁵³

This article, in foregrounding IKEA’s arrival in India, reveals one way through which the Indian image of Sweden is framed—in terms of business partnerships and global commerce. But in also drawing a connection between SD and India’s BJP it reveals again how Sweden’s election was internationally framed not only as a predictor but also continuation of a global political shift to the right.

Interestingly however, this framing of the election and the image of Sweden it fostered, which was extenuated in the US and German far-right online media was not evident in India’s far-right equivalents. The Organizer, the mouthpiece of The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu Nationalist paramilitary volunteer organization in India (of which Modi is also a member), only mentioned Sweden in one article during the sample period and this related to the Swedish company SAAB’s decision to manufacture its Carl-Gustaf M4 weapon system in India. In short, Sweden at the time of its election seems not to have commanded the attention of the Indian far right.

China: quotational politics and the decline of Western democracy

During the sample period, only eight articles directly related to Sweden were published on the original language website of China’s biggest official newspaper, The People’s Daily (人民网) but 22 were so on its English website. The focus of the original language articles lay on the right-wing coalition and SD’s political position contextualized at both the Swedish, national, and European regional levels. For example, the election was framed as “a huge turn of the political situation in Sweden”⁵⁴ while one article provided a detailed overview of the main political parties in Sweden with direct quotations from Magdalena Andersson. Swedish and French newspapers (Aftonbladet and Le Figaro) were both cited in another article with the latter providing the following quote:

…the current economic crisis has led to the exhaustion of the welfare-state model of Sweden. Grassroots voters have declined trust in the Swedish government and are disappointed in the political establishment….⁵⁵

Elsewhere, the Swedish election was mentioned in connection to the political shift to the right of other EU democracies including, as with many of the online media of the other countries studied, Italy. Here, the rise of European radical-right populist parties was connected to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine along with its resulting energy and inflation crises. Another article, entitled “Russian media: Pitfalls of Western democracies revealed,” was a direct translation of a Russia Today (RT) commentary piece.⁵⁶ Revealing the overlap between RT and The People’s Daily views of the “instability” of Western democracies, it argued that a “decisive feature of Western politics” is rapid and frequent leadership changes that fail to ensure political stability. This framing of Sweden did not just rely on the notion that the country is an archetypal welfare state nor just exemplary of Europe and the EU but also a proxy for Western democracy more broadly. In this it also highlighted how some non-Western media audiences draw connections between the welfare state and Western democracy.

Such perspectives were also evident in five English People’s Daily election-related articles.⁵⁷ These articles reported on: predicted SD’s gains and a close election contest; Europe’s energy crisis in connection to rising populism and the stability of the EU; the consequences of the Italian and Swedish election results for the EU; the European turn to the right and its impact on views of China; and the official announcement of Kristersson as Prime Minister. Uniquely there was an emphasis on right-wing EU skepticism and its global ramifications.

The election in Sweden this Sunday will be the first test of the political temperature in Europe, and EU officials are watching closely….The rising populism in Europe will further tear apart the unity within the EU, and also disrupt ties between Brussels and Washington.⁵⁸

In fact, the entire Western world is facing the challenge of “turning right.” Before the Italian election, Sweden’s rightist camp also won the majority of votes in the general election…A very bad political atmosphere has emerged in Western countries, that is, China is passively involved in everything, and China is to be blamed for every problem.⁵⁹

In their English coverage of the Swedish election, People’s Daily writers cited US media sources (CNN, Fox News and Bloomberg) rather than Swedish, French, or Russian sources, indicating a politics of quotation tailored to different reading audiences.

On Guancha.cn, an alternative ultranationalist news website where nationalistic ideas enjoy widespread popularity, Sweden was discussed in six articles during the sample period. These and the comments they received, reveal a more sensationalist and extreme framing of the Swedish election results as symptomatic of the decline of Western democracy. This is evident from article headlines and section headlines like “China can overcome the pitfalls of Western democracies” or “China’s rise lies in the rejection of Western political models” which emphasized China’s global political importance even when the article was about Sweden.

The comments beneath some of these articles were also revealing. One commenter drew explicit parallels (like the author of the Times of India opinion piece) between SD and Trumpian politics: “‘Putting Sweden first’ is the Swedish version of MAGA.” Interestingly, the same user also saw similarities between the decline of the “white left” (or progressive liberalism) in Western democracies and the decline of “public intellectuals” and “anti-nationalist” attitudes in China. Other commenters blurred radical right and left-wing populism in the West and framed anti-capitalism as the driving force behind a populist Western revolt: “Le Pen in France, Corbyn in the UK, and Sanders in the US are excluded from the political system by capital.”

Concluding discussion: a turning or tipping point in Sweden’s image abroad?

In response to our first research question, our analysis shows that the 2022 Swedish election gained most online media attention in the US, Germany, India, and China around the election day and then again on the day of the announcement of the new government. The exception to this was in Germany where, despite generally being overshadowed by coverage of Sweden’s role in broader geopolitical events (as was the case in the other three countries), traditional online media coverage of the Swedish election was more sustained throughout the sample period, including in the run-up to election day. As noted, this is perhaps unsurprising given that Germany is geographically the closest neighbor to Sweden among the selected countries. For the sampled far-right online media, the results were more mixed. In the US, the election was discussed more in the far-right websites studied than in their traditional counterparts, again mostly around the election proper and the announcement of the new government. Attention to the election was also relatively pronounced in the German far-right Telegram channels and groups but almost non-existent in the selected Indian and Chinese far-right online media.

Ultimately, and relating back to the titles of the 2018 and 2022 SI election reports, which translate to “news item or global news?” (Notis eller världsnyhet?), in both the traditional and far-right online media, the Swedish election featured more as the former than the latter. It was reported but not necessarily considered to be a global event itself. However, it did take on greater global significance when its results coalesced with the outcome of the later Italian election—an event that also facilitated the greater discussion of the Swedish election at that time in many of the sampled media sources. The two elections, cojoined occasionally also with the results of the earlier French elections, and even political developments beyond Europe, were consistently framed as exemplifying a political shift to the right not only in the countries themselves but across Europe and the globe, linking to our second research question.

While Sweden was framed in connection to several different events—some geopolitical (the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the NordStream leaks) and some intricately connected to the country (the Nobel prizes)—during the study period, it was in the coverage of the election that the foreign image of Sweden was most clearly framed. This was because the election, and to a lesser extent the discussion of Sweden’s NATO membership (given the country’s history of neutrality), in being directly about Sweden had more immediate relevance to how the country was framed abroad than those events that only somehow incidentally involved or had consequences for the country.

The 2022 election was most consistently framed as indicating Sweden’s, but also Europe’s, political shift to the right. This framing flattened country-level diversity regarding the different dynamics of radical-right populism in various European nations.⁶⁰ Echoing others, our analysis shows how, in general, the framing of this shift was more neutrally conveyed in the traditional online media and more sensationally and harshly communicated in the far-right online media.⁶¹ However, it also uniquely reveals how this shift was framed in different ways that saw the image of Sweden refracted through the specific political situations and inclinations of the different countries and media sources studied.

In left-leaning traditional media sources such as Germany’s Der Spiegel, SD’s election success was interpreted as indicating a political turning point that potentially spelled the end of Sweden’s left-wing progressive image.⁶² In the US far-right online media, the right-ward shift was meanwhile framed not just as a turning point but arguably as a tipping point—a point of no return and a positive political change which would reverse Sweden’s left-wing dystopia and arrest its decline. In India, traditional online media occasionally connected these shifts to the country’s own national political situation in terms of the rise of BJP, and in China traditional online media framed the election outcome not as an end to a Swedish left-wing dystopia and the country’s decline but as a slide into a new decline and alternative dystopia characterized by Western democracy’s curtailment by radical-right populism. Thus, in the countries we studied, traditional and far-right online media were not only interested in the implications of the Swedish election for the image of Sweden as an archetypal welfare state but also for the image of Europe and the EU. Furthermore, in the Chinese case, the image of Sweden not only contributed to that of Europe but the image of Western Democracy more broadly.

Herein is evidence that the 2022 election, like that of 2018, may not have been a global news event per se but was again mediated and “deterritorialised” with repercussions for Sweden’s international image.⁶³ In this sense, Sweden and its 2022 election took on relevance for US, German, Indian and Chinese online media, and audiences only insofar as it mirrored something of these countries’, medias’, and audiences’ own politics.⁶⁴ In these settings the country and its election were framed to mean something (with respect to the welfare state, Europe and western democracy) rather than being considered meaningful in and of themselves. Again, for the most part this was done so in a more neutral manner by the traditional online media that we studied whereas those far-right online media, and especially those from the US and Germany where we found the most relevant material, did so in a more explicit way in keeping with their political orientation.

So, the US traditional online media reported the election more straightforwardly albeit with a focus on the newsworthiness of SD’s gains and the issues of crime and immigration. The US far-right online media, in contrast, sensationalized crime and immigration and pointed to SD as the solution to these issues. In this way the latter took a populist (or Trumpian) stance whereby elites and traditional online media could be accused of ignoring the main issues while far-right online media could channel the view of SD in championing the concerns of “the people.” Similarly, the interpretation of the election communicated in the German far-right Telegram channels and groups departs strongly from that of the two German traditional online media studied insofar as it is used to vindicate the radical right populist politics of Germany’s AfD party. In the US and Germany then, far-right online media inflected the Swedish election and its results to legitimate an anti-elite and exclusionary nationalist turn within their own countries.

It is harder to compare the framing of the election by traditional and far-right online media in India and China for the simple reason that the election was discussed less in the media sources we sampled from these countries. Still, a far-right framing of the Swedish election and thus image that painted SD in a more sympathetic light could be discerned when it was discussed by the Modi-supporting Republic TV, even if this was occasionally balanced by the Times of India drawing less-flattering comparisons between SD and BJP. It was even somewhat discernible in the Chinese traditional online media that reinforced the party-state’s left-wing position of superiority toward failing Western democracy. Here, as has been noted of the 2018 election,⁶⁵ Sweden was framed via threats considered to face the entire Western world with the added impetus that these threats had become more pronounced over the intervening four years. On Guancha.cn more extreme interpretations of the Swedish election segued into discussions of the stability and unity of China’s grassroots left-wing populism that were contrasted with Western radical-right populism. There was also evidence that in both India and China Sweden’s election was viewed through the prism of US politics and specifically Trump’s former presidency.

But what might all this mean more broadly for the shifting international image of Sweden and the country’s importance to far-right actors abroad? To reiterate, almost universally common across all online media accounts of the election that we studied was an emphasis on the growing strength of the radical right populist SD and its anti-immigrant and nationalist policies. But how this shapes the image of Sweden abroad remains debatable. For instance, it too depends on the political perspective adopted in a seemingly ever-more polarized world. If SD’s 2022 election success marks a turning point in Sweden’s image abroad, then for whom is this a turn for the worse and for whom is it a turn for the better? Amongst some quarters, not least those associated with international far-right actors, it is a case of the latter but for many still committed to what might now be referred to as the old image of Sweden it is a matter of the former and a stark warning regarding the future.

While during the weeks surrounding the 2022 election, we found evidence that it was interpreted by different actors as indicating both an end to Sweden’s progressive left-wing image and simultaneously a larger rightwards and anti-globalist shift, we might still conclude that many of the foreign framings of the election as a turning or indeed tipping point for Sweden’s image might be skewed. They augur a more exclusionary and authoritarian world order, but whether such an order is in the offing remains an open question. In short, it is not clear how strongly or irrevocably Sweden has or will turn rightwards.

If the 2022 election results and SD’s gains were to be treated as a tipping point, there might be reason to redesignate Sweden and its image quickly and wholly as right-wing (which by certain definitions they now are) and yet, for the immediate future, the reality might be far more mundane and relate to the extent to which SD’s governmental influence is normalized or not. Some of the traditional online media we studied have clearly already started this process, as have in fact, in their own ways, those far-right online media that conspiratorially view the new Swedish government and SD as equally vulnerable to higher elite powers (like WEF). As the election fades from international view, the foreign image of Sweden may remain relatively unaltered and stable—barring no major additional political upheavals or policy changes. While the timing of the retraction of the country’s feminist foreign policy insured it gained global attention, the drip of any future policy changes may lead to fewer ripples in the international image of the country.

It should be acknowledged that country images are also relational and relative. Sweden has been “neoliberalizing” and thus shifting to the right for a long time, but the country is arguably less far down that path than many others. Thus, even if the country’s earlier exceptionalism with regards to the electoral failure of radical right parties is now a distant memory,⁶⁶ to many foreign audiences its image may stay broadly in line with what it has been in the past—a progressive utopia. At the same time, we can trace commonalities in terms of how right and left-wing populism are shifting: the common denominator in all four countries, shared with SD in Sweden, is that the traditional right, which has been seen in the past as championing global unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism”) is increasingly attacked from an ultranationalist, anti-globalist and economic protectionist or welfare chauvinist right, in favor of “the common people.” The success that SD, now with one foot in and one foot out of power, achieve with such attacks in the coming years will likely determine the extent to which the significance of Sweden to international far-right actors grows or wanes and indeed whether such actors seek to emulate or evade the country’s fate.

All this points to the need for further research into these matters, including along several potentially interesting avenues that became apparent during our analysis. Most obviously the exploratory nature of our efforts has prevented the study of a greater number of countries and a more comprehensive range of media sources, but each of these could certainly enhance our understanding of the influence of elections on the shifting foreign image of Sweden. There is also scope for further studies of the 2022 election as well as earlier and future elections, not to mention those of other countries whose images also hold international significance to different political actors. Future studies could also interrogate more closely the authorship of articles and posts relating to Sweden online and not only compare different traditional and far-right online media, but also explore the connections between them. Our analysis already indicates a politics of news sourcing, citation and remediation involving syndicate feeds, selective quotations, and verbatim reproductions. Finally, it would be interesting to study in more detail how the changing image of Sweden abroad relates to that of it domestically, with several recent studies connecting SD’s successes to the domestic view of the country being in decline.⁶⁷

Time will tell whether the end of the cordon sanitaire around SD will lead to their defanging or whether the true tipping point in Sweden’s politics and foreign image alike will come at the next or some other future election, if at all. Although such a point is by no means inevitable, SD’s positioning outside of official government but with significant governmental influence may strategically provide the party with a springboard for future gains insofar as it can currently frustrate the workings of government without shouldering any of the blame, allowing its supporters both at home and abroad to consider it as victor and victim in a single breath. The turning or tipping point in Sweden’s image abroad suggested by the 2022 election could turn out to be exaggerated or delayed. But far-right views of the country expressed online nevertheless provide straws in the wind of a larger shifting political order, and a digital reservoir of support for such a shift.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2021-01609.

Notes on contributors

Samuel Merrill

Samuel Merrill is an Associate Professor at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology and Digital Social Research Centre.

Ralph Schroeder

Ralph Schroeder is Professor in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Mathilda Åkerlund

Mathilda Åkerlund is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology and Digital Social Research Centre.

Vihang Jumle

Vihang Jumle is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Bern.

Jan Rau

Jan Rau is a Researcher at the Media Research Methods Lab of the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institute, working on its (Social) Media Observatory, a project for the Research Institute Social Cohesion.

Christian Schwieter

Christian Schwieter is a Doctoral Candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Stockholm University.

Pu Yan

Dr Pu Yan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Management at Peking University.

Philipp Kessling

Phillip Kessling is a Junior Researcher at the Media Research Methods Lab of the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hand-Bredow-Institute.

Notes

1 In this article we use “right-wing” to describe the right side of the political spectrum and a range of ideologies spanning from the “center-right” to the “far-right” without equating it to any specific position on that spectrum.

2 Nicholas Aylott and Niklas Bolin, “A New Right: The Swedish Parliamentary Election of September 2022,” West European Politics 46, no.5 (2022): 1–14.

3 On the different strategic responses of mainstream political parties to the growing strength of radical-right populist parties in the Nordic countries, see Anna-Sophie Heinze, “Strategies of Mainstream Parties Towards Their Right-Wing Populist Challengers: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in Comparison,” West European Politics 41, no. 2 (2018): 287–309; Aylott and Bolin, “A New Right”; Anders Hellström,” The Losers Are Winning Thanks to the Sweden Democrats,” European Centre for Populism Studies (2022). https://www.populismstudies.org/the-losers-are-winning-in-sweden-thanks-to-the-sweden-democrats/ (accessed 13 November).

4 In this article, we use “far-right” as an umbrella term that encompasses radical-right populism and right-wing extremism with the former accepting and the latter rejecting democracy, see Tore Bjørgo and Jacob A. Ravndal, Extreme-Right Violence and Terrorism: Concepts, Patterns, and Responses. (The Hague, The Netherlands: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2019). http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep19624.

5 Carl Marklund, “The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model: Three Frames for the Image of Sweden,” Scandinavian Journal of History 34, no. 3 (2009): 264–85.

6 Carly E. Schall, The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine: Immigration and Social Democracy in Twentieth-Century Sweden (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

7 Marklund, “The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model.”

8 Ibid.

9 Jenny Andersson and Mary Hilson, “Images of Sweden and the Nordic Countries,” Scandinavian Journal of History 34, no. 3 (2009): 219–28.

10 Kazimierz Musiał and Maja Chacińska, “Constructing a Nordic Community in the Polish Press—Past and Present,” in Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region, edited by Peter Stadius and Jonas Harvard (Farnhamn: Ashgate, 2013), 289–318; Allan Pred, Even in Sweden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Schall, The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Welfare Machine.

11 Greg Simons, “Swedish Government and Country Image during the International Media Coverage of the Coronavirus Pandemic Strategy: From Bold to Pariah,” Journalism and Media 1, no. 1, (2020): 41–58.

12 Henrik Selin and Jacob Stenberg,” Sverige i utländska medier—från välfärdsföredöme till mer komplex bild,” in Om journalistik och verklighet, edited by Jonas A. Schwarz et al. (Stockholm: Institutet för mediestudier, 2018), 99–119.

13 Ibid.

14 Peter Stadius and Jonas Harvard, editors, Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region (Farnhamn: Ashgate, 2013).

15 Catherine Thorleifsson, “The Swedish Dystopia: Violent Imaginaries of the Radical Right,” Patterns of Prejudice 53, no. 5 (2019): 515–33; Gavan Titley, “Taboo News About Sweden: The Transnational Assemblage of a Racialized Spatial Imaginary,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 39, no. 11/12 (2019): 1010–23.

16 Paul Rapacioli, Good Sweden, Bad Sweden (Stockholm: Volante, 2018); Titley, Taboo News About Sweden; Mathilda Åkerlund, “The Sweden Paradox: US Far-Right Fantasies of a Dystopic Utopia,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 49, no. 19, 4789–808.

17 Chloe Colliver, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Applebaum, and Jonathan Birdwell, Smearing Sweden: International Influence Campaigns in the 2018 Swedish Election (London: ISD, 2018).

18 Jessica Y. Robinson and Gunn Enli, “#MakeSwedenGreatAgain: Media Events as Politics in the Deterritorialised Nationalism Debate,” Nordic Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 1 (2022): 56–80.

19 Nadezhda Ozornina and Alexander Mannin, “Framing the Image of Russia in the British Media During the World Cup 2018,” Russian Journal of Communication 12, no. 2 (2020): 121–36.

20 Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of International News,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–8.

21 Göran Bolin and Galina Miazhevich, “The Soft Power of Commercialised Nationalist Symbols: Using Media Analysis to Understand Nation Branding Campaigns,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 21, no. 5 (2018): 527–42; Giovanna Dell’Orto, Dong Dong, Adina Schneeweis, and Jensen Moore, “The Impact of Framing on Perception of Foreign Countries,” Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 25, no. (2) (2004): 294–312.

22 Jesper Strömbäck, “Political Alternative Media as a Democratic Challenge,” Digital Journalism 11, no. 5 (2023): 880–87; Nora Theorin and Jesper Strömbäck, “Some Media Matter More Than Others: Investigating Media Effects on Attitudes Toward and Perceptions of Immigration in Sweden,” International Migration Review 54, no. 4 (2020): 1238–64.

23 SI, Notis eller världsnyhet? Det svenska valet 2018 i internationell nyhetsrapportering och på sociala medier (Stockholm, Sweden: Svenska Institutet, 2018).

24 SI, Notis eller världsnyhet? Hur riksdagsvalet i Sverige 2022 porträtterats utomlands (Stockholm, Sweden: Svenska Institutet, 2022).

25 Thomas Weitin, “Scalable Reading,” Z Literaturwiss Linguistik 47 (2017): 1–6.

26 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

27 Chenchen Zhang, “Right-Wing Populism with Chinese Characteristics? Identity, Otherness and Global Imaginaries in Debating World Politics Online,” European Journal of International Relations 26, no. 1 (2020): 88–115.

28 Herbert Blumer, “What Is Wrong With Social Theory?” American Sociological Review 18 (1954): 3–10.

29 SI, Notis eller världsnyhet? Det svenska valet 2018 i internationell nyhetsrapportering och på sociala medier.

30 https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/europe-is-facing-its-own-migrant-crisis-and-its-boosting-conservatives/, New York Post, 3 October.

31 https://nypost.com/2022/09/19/death-of-fact-checking-socialist-dodging-taxes-and-more-commentary/.

32 Sweden was also mentioned in relation to various other miscellaneous issues.

33 https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/09/17/center-right-populist-coalition-ousts-swedens-leftist-government-n628875, Red State 17 September.

34 Rapacioli, Good Sweden, Bad Sweden; Titley, Taboo News About Sweden.

35 In one instance this involved the reproduction of a UK Daily Mail article.

36 Colliver, Smearing Sweden; Robinson and Enli, “#MakeSwedenGreatAgain.”

37 https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/08/29/swedish-populists-warn-mail-in-ballot-sabotage-ahead-elections/, Breitbart, 29 August.

38 For a study of public perceptions of accusations of election fraud during the 2022 Swedish elections see Nora Theorin, Sofia Johansson, Jesper Strömbäck, and Bengt Johansson,” Valfusk i Sverige? Allmänhetens syn på oegentligheter vid Svenska val,” Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 125, no. 4 (2023): 1009–34.

39 “‘The fix is in’ is a US idiom that conveys that a contest’s outcome has been dishonestly controlled”. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/09/12/fix-is-in-mail-in-and-overseas-votes-could-overturn-rights-narrow-lead-in-swedish-election/.

40 On the deeper lineage of the far right’s normalization in a more global context (see Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019]).

41 https://vdare.com/articles/revolution-in-sweden-immigrant-patriot-sweden-democrats-effectively-in-power, VDARE, 18 October.

42 https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/10/swedens-parliament-elects-populist-prime-minister, Jihad Watch, 18 October.

43 Åkerlund, “The Sweden Paradox.”

44 https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/will-the-right-win-here-next/.

45 https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/schweden-kriminalitaet-103.html.

46 https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/italien-wahl-afd-jubelt-mateusz-morawiecki-sendet-glueckwuensche-an-giorgia-meloni-a-8856401a-1799-467c-bf6c-ccff78050e7c, Der Spiegel, 26 September.

47 We refer to “conspiracy theory” here in a rather straightforward manner to indicate a commonly recognized phenomenon but accept that what defines “conspiracy theory” as a term and a concept has been extensively debated. see Andrew McKenzie-McHarg,” Conceptual History and Conspiracy Theory,” in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 16–27. Heidi Schulze, Julian Hohner, Simon Greipl, Maxmimilian Girgnhuber, Isabell Desta, and Diana Rieger, “Far-Right Conspiracy Groups on Fringe Platforms: A Longitudinal Analysis of Radicalization Dynamics on Telegram,” Convergence 28, no. 4 (2022): 1103–26; L. Gerster, R. Kuchta, D. Hammer, and C. Schwieter, Telegram as a Buttress: How Far-Right Extremists and Conspiracy Theorists Are Expanding Their Infrastructures Via Telegram (ISD, 2022).

48 IDZ, Datensatz rechter, verschwörungsaffiner Mobilsierungsnetzwerke bei Telegram (Jena: Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft, 2021).

49 Åkerlund, “The Sweden Paradox.”

50 Mattias Ekman, “The Great Replacement: Strategic Mainstreaming of Far-Right Conspiracy Claims,” Convergence 28, no. 4 (2022): 1127–43; Samuel Merrill and Mathilda Åkerlund, “Standing Up for Sweden? The Racist Discourses, Architectures and Affordances of an Anti-immigration Facebook Group,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23, no. 6 (2018): 332–53.

51 https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/sweden-holds-election-expected-to-boost-anti-immigrant-party-articleshow.html, Republic TV, 11 September.

52 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/swedes-vote-in-tight-election-race-as-far-right-surges/articleshow/94131115.cms, Times of India, 11 September.

53 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/why-far-right-is-on-the-rise-in-liberal-europe/articleshow/94378916.cms, Times of India, 22 September.

54 http://world.people.com.cn/n1/2022/0915/c1002-32526845.html.

55 http://world.people.com.cn/n1/2022/0929/c1002-32536603.html, The People’s Daily (人民网), 22 September.

56 http://world.people.com.cn/n1/2022/1008/c1002-32540894.html.

57 These exceeded those related to the Nobel prizes (4) but were less than those dedicated to the NordStream leaks (6).

58 http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0913/c90000-10146179.html, The People’s Daily, 13 September.

59 http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0927/c90000-10152101.html, The People’s Daily, 27 September.

60 For a discussion of such diversity in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic see Olivares-Jirsell and Hellström (Jellen Olivares-Jirsell and Anders Hellström, “Activities and Counterstrategies: Populism During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Populism 6, no. 2 (2023): 107–25.

61 Selin and Stenberg, Sverige i utländska medier; SI, Notis eller världsnyhet? Hur riksdagsvalet i Sverige 2022 porträtterats utomlands.

62 Some within Sweden might point to earlier turning points such as when SD first entered parliament in 2010.

63 Robinson and Enli, “#MakeSwedenGreatAgain.”

64 See Åkerlund, “The Sweden Paradox.”

65 Robinson and Enli, “#MakeSwedenGreatAgain.”

66 Jens Rydgren and Sara van der Meiden, “The Radical Right and the End of Swedish Exceptionalism,” European Political Science 18 (2019): 439–455; A. Hellström, Trust Us: Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties (New York: Berghahn, 2016).

67 Johanna Lindell and Lisa Pelling, Det Svenska Missnoejet (Falun: Atlas Bokfoerlaget, 2021).