In the summer of 2016, whilst in Sweden, I went to a regional conference of the Sweden Democrats Party, held in Västerås, in the centre of the country. In the manner of an academic conference, several hundred party members gathered to hear a day of speeches. Party leaders mingled with the party members, and although everybody was in agreement that they were nationalists there was not the remotest sign of racism or extremism. There was much talk among party members and leaders of how to halt the government’s immigration policies, but the mainly young leadership were striking in private and public for their moderation. In private they wanted to know their visitor’s thoughts on Viktor Orbán and other European leaders who – like them – objected to mass migration. How savoury were they? Which were allies, and which were actually ‘extreme’? This party that the media in Sweden and abroad continue to portray as ‘far right’ and ‘fascist’, seemed as worried about the actual far-right and fascists as everybody else.

Whatever their views, the party’s recent success is hardly surprising. The country’s politics have swiftly changed because the demographics have so swiftly changed. According to the Swedish economist Dr Sanandaji (himself of Kurdish-Iranian origin), in 1990 non-European immigrants counted for just 3 per cent of Sweden’s population. By 2016 that figure had increased to around 13–14 per cent and is now growing at between one and two percentage points a year. In Malmö – Sweden’s third-largest city – non-ethnic Swedes already constitute almost half of the population. According to Sanandaji, within a generation other cities will follow and ethnic Swedes will be a minority in all the major cities: partly as a result of immigration, partly as a result of higher birth rates among immigrants, and partly as a result of ethnic Swedes abandoning areas where immigrants dominate. Not the least interesting aspect of surveys of Swedish attitudes is that even while so-called ‘white flight’ goes on, the average Swede still says it is important to live in a multicultural neighbourhood. Indeed, those who have moved away from ‘multicultural’ areas are disproportionately likely to say how important it is to live in them.7

A gap clearly exists in Sweden as elsewhere across the continent between what people think and what they believe they are meant to think. And while the attitudes of Europeans are continuing to move in the same direction, at varying speeds, their political leaders still continue to take decisions that will make those views change faster still. Sweden is merely an extreme demonstration of a trend.