Jimmie Akesson and his colleagues had the choice of either forming a new party or taking over a party that already existed. They chose the latter option and throughout the 2000s worked to expel remaining far-right elements from the Sweden Democrats and make it into a nationalist but non-racist movement. No credit was given to them for doing so. The media and other politicians continued to describe the Sweden Democrats as ‘far-right’, ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’, and continued to portray them as neo-Nazis. In the 2010 general election the party won more than 5 per cent of the vote and entered Parliament for the first time. The other parliamentary parties were aghast and treated the new MPs as pariahs, refusing to have any dealings with them, cooperate with them or even talk to them.

Yet in the years after that election the issues of immigration and identity that the Sweden Democrats were raising came to the fore. Up until then the country had experienced the same symptoms as the rest of Europe, although arguably worse than anywhere else. Its culture of self-negation was especially strong. In 2006 the country’s Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt (from the conservative ‘Moderate’ party) had proclaimed, ‘Only barbarism is genuinely Swedish. All further development has been brought from outside.’ The Churches in Sweden reinforced all mainstream political views. For instance, the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, Antje Jackelén, among other prominent clergy insisted that the country’s migration policies must keep in mind that ‘Jesus himself was a refugee’.

With a weary predictability this era also witnessed an exponential rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Sweden. As the Muslim immigrant population in the city of Malmö grew, so the number of Jews in the city (which had once been a haven) began to dwindle. Jewish buildings, including the chapel of the Jewish cemetery in the city, were fire-bombed and by 2010 when the city’s Jewish community had fallen to under a thousand, as many as one in ten local Jews were harassed in a single year. Non-Jewish locals took to escorting kippah-wearing Jews to and from services and other communal events.

Despite the same warning signs as everywhere else, from 2010 migration into Sweden accelerated rapidly. Potential migrants from around the world saw Sweden as especially desirable, with new arrivals not only given housing and welfare provisions but an especially attractive family reunification programme. In the 2014 election the Sweden Democrats more than doubled their share of the vote, becoming the third largest party in the country with almost 13 per cent of the vote. And just as everybody could see what was going on, the Swedish press accelerated their effort to avoid all stories that could feed the narrative of the Sweden Democrats and bolster their support. The results were predictably tragic.