Sveriges enda riktiga oppositionsparti? : En studie om Sverigedemokraternas politiska strategi och förhållandet till övriga riksdagspartier

Europe has under the last couple of years experienced the most critical migration problem yet, with a refugee crisis that has affected the European view on migration. In correlation with this change, right wing populistic parties have had an upswing. These parties have during the last couple of decades succeeded to become established in the political sphere in a great amount of countries all over the continent, including Sweden. The party in Sweden is called The Swedish Democrats and their aim is to market themselves as “Sweden’s only opposition party”. Despite the party´s great work on labeling itself as the “voice of the people”, many people in the public debate have started questioning this self-proclaimed status. They mean that The Swedish Democrats have approached the opinions of the establishment, making their stand as the only opposition party fake and populistic. The aim of this paper was to examine this thought, whether the public debaters were correct about the politics of The Swedish Democrats and if they have truly become closer to the political elite. This essay studied motions from The Swedish Democrats during 2010/2011 and 2016/2017, these were compared with motions from the two biggest parties in the parliament, The Social Democrats and The Moderate Party. By comparing the motions the paper hoped to see if the politics of the parties had closed in on each other and which party that had changed their political stand. The motions were examined by implementing the Toulmin-schedule, an analytical tool that structured the political stand of the parties. The theory of this paper was based on the anti-establishment theory by Jens Rydgren and an addition to this was Alain de Benoists utopian thoughts about Ethnopluralism. The conclusion of this essay was that the parties had not approached each other between the periods of 2010/2011 and 2016/2017. This was explained by applying the anti-establishment theory on The Swedish Democrats, to maintain their exceptional position in the political sphere they need to not come too close to the other parties’ political stand. By assimilating the ideas of Ethnopluralism, The Swedish Democrats becomes too radical and distant to the rest of the parties of parliament, insuring the exceptional political positioning. In the following chapter this empirical analysis is discussed and the paper lands in the conclusion that a more research-based debate about the political parties is necessary to shut down the ill arguments and discussions that flows all over the medial sphere, and that a firmer dialogue about nationalism and the Swedish identity is critical to not suffocate the public opinion