In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Karl Loxbo of Stockholm University examines Sweden as an increasingly striking case of radical-right mainstreaming. He argues that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral decline should not be confused with diminishing political influence, since the party’s rhetoric and policy positions—especially on immigration—have become widely normalized. Assoc. Prof. Loxbo stresses that Sweden has moved “from one extreme to the other,” with SD incorporated into the right-wing bloc and restrictive migration policies broadly accepted across mainstream politics. He also discusses changing boundaries of political acceptability, elite cues, the “bandwagon effect,” Social Democratic accommodation, and the wider European consequences of legitimizing the radical right. Ultimately, he links these developments to “the declining legitimacy of mainstream politics.”
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
Giving an interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Karl Loxbo, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University, argues that Sweden has become an unusually far-reaching case of radical-right mainstreaming. For Assoc. Prof. Loxbo, the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback in the September 13 election should not be read as evidence that their political influence has receded. On the contrary, he stresses that the party’s ideas, rhetoric, and policy preferences have become deeply embedded in Swedish political competition. “Sweden is a special—or I would even dare to say extreme—case,” he says, pointing to the speed with which the Sweden Democrats have been incorporated into the right-wing bloc and accepted by other parties.
The central paradox of the interview is therefore the growing distance between electoral support and ideological influence. Although SD lost votes, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo argues that the party has helped transform the boundaries of acceptable political debate, particularly on immigration. Sweden, he notes, has moved from a comparatively liberal migration regime to a radically more restrictive one, a transformation that is “largely due to the SD.” More significantly, he observes that there is now “no opposition in principle to this among the mainstream parties.”
This process, in Assoc. Prof. Loxbo’s account, goes beyond policy convergence. Restrictive positions on immigration have become “highly normalized throughout the political debate and in the media,” while SD’s “rhetoric and policy positions have been extensively normalized in Sweden.” The result is not simply that the radical right has entered the mainstream, but that the mainstream itself has shifted.
Assoc. Prof. Loxbo also emphasizes how dramatically the boundaries of political acceptability have changed. “What would not have been considered acceptable 10 years ago certainly is today,” he says, adding that these boundaries have been “completely erased and redrawn.” In his view, this transformation is reinforced when mainstream elites adopt positions previously associated with the radical right, creating what he describes as a “bandwagon effect” in which citizens either shift their views or become more willing to express preferences they already held.
The Swedish experience, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo warns, carries broader European implications. Once mainstream right parties legitimize the radical right, he argues, “the party system can be reshaped beyond recognition.” Sweden’s incorporation of SD into the right-wing bloc has already produced long-term changes that, while perhaps not fully permanent, now appear deeply entrenched.
Ultimately, Assoc. Prof. Loxbo situates radical-right mainstreaming within a wider crisis of representation. The radical right, he argues, is “just a symptom of a broader phenomenon: the declining legitimacy of mainstream politics.” The democratic challenge, therefore, is not merely whether SD loses votes, but whether mainstream parties can once again develop distinctive agendas and reclaim the capacity to shape political conflict on their own terms.
