By Johan Ahlander and Tom Little
STOCKHOLM, Sept 14 (Reuters) – Immigrants in Sweden expressed relief on Monday after voters dealt the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, whose rise helped drive the country’s politics sharply to the right on immigration, their first setback in a parliamentary election.
After a nail-biting election night on Sunday, the centre-left looked likely to secure a slim majority in parliament. The Sweden Democrats lost more seats than any other party and looked set to win 17.6% of the vote, down three percentage points from four years ago.
In Rinkeby, one of Stockholm’s suburbs with a large immigrant population, the centre-left bloc won 94% of the votes. One resident, 59-year-old sociologist Kahin Ahmed, who is originally from Somalia, welcomed the result.
“It’s a huge relief,” he said. “I think people in the suburbs turned out to vote in large numbers because they were afraid the Sweden Democrats would make things worse.”
The Sweden Democrats, who in parliament have lent support to the right-wing minority government for the past four years while remaining outside the cabinet, in part campaigned on sending home larger numbers of immigrants and ending multiculturalism, with proposals such as a ban on traditional Islamic dress for women in public.
Sweden Democrat leaders blamed the loss on tactical voting for other right-wing parties and said that they had been punished for propping up the government for four years.
“That was always a risk,” Richard Jomshof, a Sweden Democrat member of parliament, told Reuters. “It’s part of being a bigger, more established party. It hurts like hell, but it’s just part of reality that we, too, can lose votes,” he said.
Silvia Kakembo, founder of the Integration Bureau, a non-partisan organisation that promotes integration, said the Sweden Democrats’ efforts to expel immigrants and their proposal to withdraw already granted residence permits had gone too far, helping mobilise some voters against them.
“I interpret this to mean that many people have considered this election important, maybe even existential,” she said.
The Sweden Democrats had grown steadily over decades, entering parliament for the first time in 2010 as voters balked at soaring levels of immigration. About 2.5 million people have immigrated to Sweden in the last 25 years.
Across town, in the suburb of Skarholmen, Celil Tamturk, 59, originally from Turkey, said he was very happy about the tentative result and that he had been put off by Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Akesson’s comments on Islam and immigrants.
“If there were no immigrants here, after two days not working, what would happen? In schools, in healthcare, in the subway, there are immigrants everywhere,” he said.
“Sweden would stop immediately.”
Left-leaning parties that back the Social Democrats’ leader Magdalena Andersson were projected to win 176 seats in the 349-seat parliament while Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s bloc was seen winning 173 seats, the election authority said.
Rau Amen, 70, who came from Iraq 44 years ago, said he was afraid that the Sweden Democrats were trying to create an “us versus them” mentality within the country.
“That is absolutely not what I want. Sweden has been fantastic so far, and I love Sweden. I want things to be the way they used to be,” he said.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Tom Little, additional reporting by Greta Fondahn; editing by Niklas Pollard and Hugh Lawson)
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