There are few spectacles more reliably diverting than a European election in which the result is declared a triumph of democracy by one side and an existential catastrophe by the other, both of them quite certain that the arithmetic of the ballot box has somehow been interfered with by reality itself. Sweden has just furnished us with another of these small masterpieces. The centre-left has edged back into contention after a narrow contest, and the explanation offered in certain quarters is as blunt as a fishmonger’s cleaver: the immigrants did it.
One can almost hear the collective intake of breath among the more refined commentators. To notice that people who arrive in a country under one set of circumstances tend to vote in a particular way is regarded, in polite society, as the rhetorical equivalent of breaking wind at a state banquet. Yet the data, those tiresome little numbers that refuse to take instruction from the higher moral faculties, keep insisting on the point. Voters of foreign background in Sweden lean heavily toward the left; those of Swedish background are more evenly divided. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, observable across much of Western Europe, and it has the awkward quality of being both predictable and politically radioactive.
The argument that follows from this observation is simplicity itself, which is why it offends. If a large and growing portion of the electorate consistently prefers one political family, then the other political family faces a mathematical problem that no amount of better messaging or more photogenic candidates can solve. The left’s strategy, according to this view, is the open frontier: welcome the arrivals, naturalise them in due course, and collect the resulting votes with the serene confidence of a man who has just discovered that the roulette wheel is fixed in his favour. The right’s counter-strategy, if it wishes to remain in the game rather than become a permanent minority interest, is said to be “remigration” — a word that manages to sound both bureaucratic and faintly medieval, as though the Interior Ministry had briefly consulted the chronicles of the Reconquista.
Fire, as the original notice put it with admirable economy, is fought with fire. One may quarrel with the metaphor. Fire, after all, is an equal-opportunity consumer of furniture, and the political arsonist often ends up standing in the same ashes as his intended victim. Still, the underlying logic has a certain grim clarity. If demographic change is treated as destiny by one side, the other side can hardly be expected to treat it as an immutable force of nature. To do so would be to accept permanent exclusion from power with the stoicism of a Stoic who has misplaced his copy of Epictetus and is making do with a pamphlet from the local Green Party.
What elevates the whole business from mere arithmetic into high comedy is the solemn pretence that none of this is happening. Official discourse prefers to speak of enrichment, diversity, and the moral imperative of openness, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the electoral consequences of those virtues once they have been translated into citizenship papers. It is rather like a host who invites half the neighbourhood to dinner and then expresses mild surprise that the conversation has turned against the previous seating plan. The guests, for their part, are under no obligation to vote for the host’s preferred party simply because the canapés were adequate. Loyalty is not a condition of entry, and gratitude is not a political programme.
The right, meanwhile, finds itself in the unenviable position of having discovered the problem rather late in the evening, after the furniture has already been rearranged. Its more voluble spokesmen now talk of remigration with the sudden enthusiasm of a man who has just remembered where he left the fire extinguisher. Whether such a policy is practicable, desirable, or even coherent is a separate question; the fact that it is being proposed at all tells us something about the scale of the anxiety. Permanent minority status is a prospect that concentrates the mind wonderfully, even among politicians whose usual talents run more to slogan than to strategy.
One need not endorse the remedy to acknowledge the diagnosis. Societies that import large numbers of people from cultural and political traditions markedly different from their own should not be astonished when those people bring their preferences with them. To pretend otherwise is to treat the electorate as a blank slate upon which the host nation may write whatever values it prefers — an assumption that sits oddly with the simultaneous insistence that every culture is of equal worth and must be celebrated rather than assimilated. The contradiction is so glaring that only a professional intellectual could fail to notice it, and even then only with considerable effort.
Sweden’s narrow result is therefore less a verdict on any particular policy than a reminder of an older truth: politics is downstream of demography, and demography is downstream of decisions that were sold at the time as acts of pure benevolence. The left has played the longer game with some skill. The right is now being invited, by its own more impatient voices, to play a shorter and sharper one. Whether either side will ultimately thank the immigrants for the opportunity remains to be seen. The immigrants themselves, one suspects, will continue to vote according to their own lights, which is, after all, what free citizens are supposed to do.
The rest of us are left with the spectacle of two political camps arguing over the consequences of a transformation that both of them, in different ways, helped to create — and doing so with all the grace of men who have just realised that the house they are fighting over no longer belongs exclusively to either of them. It is, as the original note observed with devastating understatement, as simple as that. The difficulty, of course, is that simplicity has never been democracy’s strongest suit.