Sweden's Identity Crisis Deepens

For the Sweden Democrats, the solution to this seemingly impossible combination of lower taxes and a very generous welfare state centers on Sweden’s immigrants—more specifically, their removal from the country. The party, then, not only emphasizes immigration as a cultural threat but as a threat to the Swedish model. This strategy has been labeled “welfare chauvinism,” a populist approach that pits the needs of different social groups against each other. The most blatant and infamous expression of this came in the party’s campaign ad during the 2010 elections that showed a retiree hobbling forward while a hoard of Muslim women in burqas charges past to pocket money from the national budget. The choice, a voiceover said, is to “cut money from immigration budgets, or from pensions.”