Facts: SD before the election
SD’s most important issues are immigration, which they want to severely limit. Asylum immigration should ideally be a net loss.
Criminal policy and security. SD demands tougher measures, tougher penalties and expanded freedoms and methods for the police. The Correctional Service is to be renamed the Swedish Penalty Agency. The focus should be on punishment not care.
Welfare and social insurance. SD does not want to see any deterioration. The A-fund must remain at the temporarily increased level during the pandemic.
The government is preferred to sit in, but does not issue ultimatums. However, that requirement may come after the election. If you are not satisfied with the government negotiations, you do not vote for Ulf Kristersson (M).
The White Paper. A significant part of the generation that founded the party had its background in Nazi, racist or undemocratic contexts. Jimmie Åkesson believes that it has no political relevance today. The party is really different today, he believes.
Every time the issue of SD in the government comes up, the bourgeois parties rush to assure that this will not be the case. In the Liberals, it is a red line for the SD opponents in the party.
And every time everyone assures this, they raise the price of SD’s support for a bourgeois government.
— If we can’t monitor all processes, then we have to have insurance in another way in advance, so yes, that way it will be more expensive, says Åkesson.
The question is whether SD really wants to sit in a government. Then you have to take responsibility for everything. A more comfortable seat is the role of influence – and the opposition.
— But I believe in our policy, and then I want to implement it. It is clear that we want the executive power that comes with being in a government.
Government involvement is the ambition
The question is why it is not required.
— It is the substantive policy that is most important. And we have to deal with parliamentary realities. You have to find support for a government in the parliamentary basis.
Many would say that you influence policy best by sitting in a government, which Åkesson agrees with.
— So it is, and therefore our main ambition is to be part of a government.
If SD were to become the largest party on his side, the party’s voters would probably find it a little strange if the party still ends up outside the government, he admits.
— Our voters value substantive politics the most, I am convinced of that. But it is clear that people may think it will be very strange if we get bigger, but we are a single party. It will above all be more difficult to govern if we become bigger than the government, but we probably won’t be.
He does not understand the uproar around the fact that he does not rule out the Liberals being part of a government.
— I have never changed my mind. We don’t draw any red lines. I realize that the Liberals will be a problem, it is an uncertain card, but drawing red lines today without knowing what we can achieve does not feel reasonable.
The budget from the beginning
However, a red line is clear, even if he himself does not call it that, and that is the budget work. That M, KD and L would first agree on a budget that SD can influence is not relevant.
— We have been very clear that we want to be involved from the beginning, we do not want to come in from the side when it comes to the budget and actually a long list of other things. We expect that these are things that are negotiated on equal terms between the parties included in the government document.
The Sweden Democrats’ identity is largely based on being against the establishment. The question is what happens to that role if you fill ministerial positions.
— Although anti-establishment is not my self-image, it is an image others have of us. We do not belong to this old establishment, on the other hand, we are happy to be part of a new establishment, we want power and influence.
The leader of the Liberals, Johan Pehrson, insists every day that he is fighting for a liberal change of power. Jimmie Åkesson does not, whose party constitutes 3-4 times greater basis for a new government.
— I see it rather as a conservative shift in power. We will not fight for a lot of liberal reforms. The Liberals must be responsible for that.
Closer to the Social Democrats
Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson, in turn, talks about a bourgeois power shift. Although SD does not see itself as bourgeois either.
— No, we’re not. I usually call it the power shift project, because that’s what it’s about.
When Jimmie Åkesson makes historical references, it is not the old People’s Party leader Bertil Ohlin or the right-wing leader Jarl Hjalmarsson he usually brings up. It is the social democrat Per Albin Hansson.
So the question is whether SD is rather closer to the Social Democrats than the Moderates and the Liberals.
— The old social democracy was to a very high degree socially conservative, and that is what made it possible to get the hegemonic position it got. Instead of class struggle, they focused on bridging class differences and bringing business and work into the same project, and they succeeded very well in that.
No tax cuts
Jimmie Åkesson wants to guard against the social reforms and redistribution of the “old social democracy”. And it will also be among the most difficult issues for a new government, he believes.
— It’s welfare, distribution policy, social insurance, that’s where we end up. That is what separates us most from the Moderates. It’s quite a few billions budget-wise, and so far we’ve managed to keep those deteriorations at bay and it’s our ambition to do so.
That’s why Åkesson doesn’t like the Moderates’ proposal for reduced taxes that are paid for with reduced unemployment insurance and health insurance.
— We find it very difficult to buy that, of course. Given the state of the economy and how uncertain it is, the rate of inflation and the fact that we are heading into a recession, my first course of action is not to raise or lower taxes on labor. There are more important things to do in this situation, says Jimmie Åkesson.