EDITORIAL • After my interview on Swedish Radio where I mentioned ‘election cattle’, the debate has ignited. I deliberately chose the metaphor because I knew the debate would catch fire. Unsurprisingly, I noticed that the pundits of the establishment have not sobered up in their analysis of the world around them, as their indignation regarding the demographic issue breathes the same anxiety and cowardice as during the debate about immigration volumes back in 2010.
After my interview in Swedish Radio, there has been an avalanche of commentators who want to both defend immigrants’ right to vote—which was never questioned—and now also offer a whole host of “good advice” to SD on how to win the next election. At times, reading their objections and comments is a comical exercise.
A subset among these commentators consists of immigrants wanting to defend their right to vote. It’s Ali, Sandi, or similar, presented by the media to complain about the ‘voting cattle’ metaphor. As I have answered in the press, of course it’s not a zoological diagnosis.
It’s an old polemical term for a voter group considered highly mobilized for a particular alternative. No one thinks I am biologically classifying people as cattle. Pretending to be shocked by the metaphor is a way to avoid discussing the phenomenon.
My point is that many should never have been let in, let alone granted citizenship.
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Would not have needed to recruit more votes
Perhaps the most persistent theme is how other commentators now seem to want SD to simply accept the situation. Their argument is that it was SD who failed to attract enough votes, and now needs to win voters in the suburbs. But there are several issues with these lines of reasoning.
First, SD’s loss of votes likely went largely to the other Tidö parties: L’s recovery, M’s increase, as well as KD’s. So this doesn’t explain why the Tidö parties lost the election. The second part consists of votes that went to parties outside of parliament, about 50,000. These were wasted, much to the left’s delight, but it’s unclear how many would have ended up with SD. Probably some.
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But this is actually irrelevant to my argument. Regardless of how well or poorly SD performed, 50,000–60,000 imported votes in favor of the left constitute an unavoidable disadvantage. SD, or Tidö, would not have needed to gather another 50,000 votes if all these citizenships had not been granted. That shouldn’t be too hard to understand.
Adapt policies for the suburbs?
Of course SD should analyze why we didn’t mobilize more of our own voters. But even a perfect campaign would have taken place among an electorate already changed by decades of immigration and very generous citizenship rules. That’s where the commentators’ implicit advice becomes problematic: accept the situation and adapt the policy to the new electorate.
But that’s not something I will advocate.
Because if the conclusion of such major demographic change is that SD must now abandon the policy that made the party necessary in the first place, then the establishment has essentially gotten exactly what it wanted.
Instead, we should speak more clearly about demography, citizenship, and political mobilization, just as we put immigration volumes on the map. Not because all immigrants think or vote the same way, but because major demographic changes have political consequences.
That discussion must also reach people on the left who still care about secularism, equality, individual freedom, and a society where clan, religion, and ethnic loyalty do not trump citizenship.
The establishment now wants us to bow down, not talk about remigration or how demographics are changing to the detriment of Swedes. Instead, they want us to adapt to the demographic bomb that others have set in Sweden. If we do that, we’ve lost.
The alternative, in other words, is to do the opposite.