A Swedish remedy for Germany

To weaken and deradicalise. Force a largely populist and, at times, unpresentable leadership to come to terms with the needs and expectations of voters, rather than allowing it to fan the flames of their frustrations. This is the challenge facing Germany’s democratic parties, and first and foremost Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU: to force the AfD to become, little by little, a palatable party. An exercise that German politicians have so far avoided, confining themselves to drawing a cordon sanitaire around the party that began as Eurosceptic, became sovereignist and has shifted a little further to the right every day, to the point of winking at themes and slogans from the Third Reich that send shivers down the spines of Germans – and not just them. How can this be achieved? The moderate Welt recommends the Swedish approach. In Stockholm, too, the Sweden Democrats – which began with ties to neo-Nazism – were long kept on the fringes of the constitutional political spectrum. This allowed them to grow in recent years until, having secured 20.6 per cent of the vote in 2022, they were accepted as a supporting partner by the Moderate Party’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

Out of government but part of the majority. Kristersson has tightened the screws on illegal immigration without making any concessions on legal immigration, following the example of his Danish counterpart, the Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen. Whether one agrees or not, the approach has worked, and in the last election the Swedish populist party saw its winning streak come to an end, losing three percentage points for the first time (from 20.5 to 17.5 per cent). This does not mean that the party has become genuinely democratic, as its name would suggest, but it does show that populists can be stopped and that, ultimately, whether you call it a cordon sanitaire or a fire wall (Brandmauer), a policy of total isolation does not help democracy. In the former East Germany, liberal practice lags 50 years behind the rest of the country: locking voters in the same cage as the AfD’s Luciferian leaders and throwing away the key is not the answer.