Yes, I live in Sweden and this is very distressing.
can only imagine. solidarity mate.
I’ve only been living there a year and haven’t got too much involved politics, but yes they have PR. The current government is a minority coalition with the Greens and some other parties on the left. They will probably do that again, and there could also be a coalition of centrist / religious parties. So nobody is willing to form a coalition with the Sweden Democrats at least.
In all of these elections (including Trump and Brexit), people are voting on a single issue, which is immigration. In the UK the media is responsible for stirring up a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric, but that is not really the case in Sweden. I’ve had lots of conversations with seemingly progressive, left-leaning Swedes, but they still come out with a load of nonsense regarding immigration. I don’t know what the answer to this is.
According to that poll
Left-leaning - S, V, MP, FI = 38%
Centrist / conservative - M, C, L, KD = 36%
Right wing - SD = 24%
Why do you think they come out with it?
Probably because immigration is constantly framed negatively, as a problem, rather than positively. They have also handled some of the integration of asylum seekers in several places pretty badly, which hasn’t helped the situation at all.
Just had an hour Skype lesson with my Swedish teacher and discussed this. She said that a lot of pensioners (ageing population) are voting for the far-right party as they are the poorest in all of Europe. This is not true (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Sweden-has-the-poorest-senior-citizens-of-the-whole-EU). They think that the government is spending all the money on welfare for asylum seekers and other migrants, and there is none left for them, which is also not true.
Is it baby boomers, or people older than that?
If memory serves, in the Brexit vote, those of the Golden Generation were more in favour of remain than their offspring.
I think it is older, due to the Swedish pension system being front-loaded. So baby boomers are OK financially, but the very old are facing poverty. So pension reform is the answer, nothing to do with immigration.
you have to read this, absolutely terrifying
Scandinavian egalitarian social democracy (which is significantly to the left of UK social policy norms) doesn’t seem to be acting as a bulwark against the far right either then.
thought this was a daily mash article when i saw the headline
You’ve got to spike an agent or two.
“juvenile covert human intelligence sources”…
reason for rolli g descent… explained in the thread
Not just msnbc ofc; most media has done a good job of keeping yemen out of the spotlight, while playing some really grotesque semantic games with the death toll. no way is it still only 15000 after years of siege, blockades and TB and cholera epidemics (est 250000 - 500000 infected before they stopped counting).
Maybe not the right thread but an interesting example of the hostile environment:
‘We’ve had situations where say an African artist has been due to come who plays a particularly rare instrument, and we’ll be asked, ‘Can’t you find someone in the UK who plays that instrument?’, which is absurd.’