Racist dreams and municipal budgets: women representing a culturally racist party in local politics

Abstract

The welfare and migration regime of Sweden are undergoing substantial changes, as neo-liberal restructuring is rapidly increasing inequalities, and multicultural policies are in retreat as neo-assimilationist policies are growing. In 2014, the Sweden Democrats, a party conceptualised as culturally racist, was re-elected with 13% of the votes, with a presence in almost all municipalities. While scholarship on this and similar parties has expanded, the role that gender and gender equality has for the culturally racist articulation of their agenda remains unexplored. The experience of women organised in the Sweden Democrats is the focus of this article, the experience of these women engaged in local politics, working to include the Sweden Democrats' culturally racist agenda at the municipality level. The article draws upon in-depths interviews with women activists of the Sweden Democrats. Central to the article is an analysis of forms of inclusion and normalisation of the Sweden Democrats' worldviews but also of the forms of resistance towards their presence at the municipality level. Unlike mainstream research, which downplays the cultural racism of extreme right-wing parties, and rarely employ a gendered analysis, we see (cultural) racism and anti-feminism as central for their agenda.

Keywords:

• cultural racism
• gender politics
• local politics
• women activists
• Sweden Democrats

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Two qualifications are needed here. First, as Pred (2000) formulated eloquently with the title ‘Even in Sweden’, racism and racist violence have been present in Sweden. Secondly, the reference to migrants and substantial citizenship does not include irregular migrants (Sager, 2011).

2. See Table 7.1 in Berggren and Neergaard (2015, p. 194).

3. In April 2015, the party board expelled a number of members, among them the chairman and vice chairman of the formally autonomous youth association – SDU – of the party.

4. One should, however, be careful about drawing firm conclusions on specific aspects of the SD, as this also reflects the situation of any new party whose representatives are poorly schooled and not yet fully aware of what the role of an elected city council representative entails.

5. The most significant example is how they broke with a tradition of voting only on their own budget only in the national parliament, by voting in support of the right parties’ budget proposal. This created a situation in which a social democratic government was forced to implement a right-wing national budget.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under grant number 2007–7269: A contradiction in terms? The activity of women and migrants in Extreme Right-wing Populist parties: a case study of Sweden Democrats.