As a Swedish correspondent in the US, I have sometimes braced myself on trips back home for some drastic societal change I’d heard about, only to return home and find that things were in fact exactly as they’d always been. Drivers still followed the little white arrows on the road – government recommendations for maintaining safe distances between cars and a symbol of Swedish society’s strong adherence to rules and compliance. On the evening news, bureaucrats would have heated debates about such things as infrastructure and highway tolls. Politics was reliably boring; a sure sign of a healthy democracy. But over the past few years, something has genuinely changed. The political discourse is aggressive, focused on the culture wars, and seems stuck in a constant mode of outrage. The shrill vocabulary often seems to be lifted straight from American cable news. Gun violence and gang crime is at record levels – September was the most violent month for shooting deaths on record – and has helped stoke a culture of fear and an ever-escalating political blame game over immigration and asylum policies. Dehumanising immigrants is nothing new for Sweden’s nationalists and far-right groups. Now they and rightwing pundits’ attacks have broadened to encompass LGBTQ+ people, journalists, scientists, environmentalists, civil society, gun laws and an alleged cultural elite of educated urbanites failing to protect Swedish values. Björn Söder, a member of parliament for the far-right Sweden Democrats who is notorious for insulting Jewish and Sami Swedish people, this year turned his fire on the Stockholm Pride festival, an event that has been uncontroversial for two decades. He accused the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, of “legitimising paedophilia” by participating in the event. As the recently appointed chair of the Swedish delegation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Söder is not a marginal figure. His party is not formally part of the conservative governing coalition, but with 20.5% of the vote in the 2022 general election, the government needs its support to survive – it in fact directs much of the coalition’s actual policy. The Sweden Democrats’ leader, Jimmie Åkesson, meanwhile, spent most of a debate on national TV recently talking about “insane” drag queen story hours for children. Another conservative group has launched a campaign against the “bussing” of schoolchildren, framing a debate on education policy in terms that seemed Google-translated from American de-segregation politics of the 1970s. Swedish politics has always looked towards the US. For half a century, rightwing thinktanks and political organisations have sent their smartest strategists across the Atlantic to learn from the US conservative movement. But if I ever ran into a Swedish conservative visiting Washington DC, they were more likely to be on their way to a meeting with libertarian economists at the Cato Institute or an old cold war diplomat at the American Enterprise Institute rather than visiting anti-abortion activists at the Heritage Foundation or fire-breathing nationalists at CPAC. The emphasis was firmly on learning about rightwing economic policies, deregulation and free-market ideas. This changed after Donald Trump’s election. “Strategists from the Sweden Democrats and the Christian Democrats embarked on countless trips to the US to learn from the Maga conservatives, and many even worked within the Trump campaign,” says Billy McCormac. McCormac is a veteran of the centre-right thinktank Timbro and, like myself, both Swedish and American. He used to call himself a Republican, but now belongs to a generation of Swedish conservatives who are revolted by Trump. They may be a minority. Nationalism and xenophobic populism were certainly not invented in the US. Geert Wilders and France’s Le Pen family were stirring things up against European migrants a decade before Trump. But Trump’s presidency popularised these narratives globally, and emboldened Swedish nationalists to copy-paste the worst aspects of his style. Andreas Johansson Heinö, a political scientist who also works for Timbro, describes a generational shift. “Intellectuals and ideologues used to join conservative institutions here because of their views on economic policy, tax and the welfare state. Now, there’s a new generation who came into politics precisely because of the culture war, not despite it. Cultural issues are the reasons they became conservatives.” The escalation of political attacks on drag queens, young climate activists, feminists and Muslims is partly a reawakening of older, dormant forms of prejudice and bigotry. But Trump gave angry, resentful reactionaries a playbook to copy. “The Sweden Democrats looked at the Trump movement to figure out how to harness those emotions politically,” Lisa Pelling, the director of the centre-left thinktank Arena, explains. Recent shifts in public opinion also explain why conservative tacticians see an opportunity in whipping up fears about so-called “Swedish values” under threat. The first is a rightward shift in attitudes towards migration. For several decades, Sweden took pride in its welcoming immigration policy. Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Moderate party prime minister, famously left office in 2014 advocating for Swedish citizens to “open your hearts” to refugees. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers came to Sweden in the mid-2010s, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. The country took in the highest per capita number of refugees in the EU in 2015. But amid a proliferation of what Johansson Heinö calls “conservative narratives” in the media, and the rise of the Sweden Democrats, the public mood hardened away from multiculturalism. “This is one of the most significant polling shifts in Swedish history. After the surge of migrants in 2014 and 2015, conservative narratives dominated the discourse, and we saw a very distinct opinion shift,” says Johansson Heinö. It led to a radical tightening of immigration policies. Gun violence – which escalated this summer – has provoked both soul-searching about social exclusion and conservative crime narratives that scapegoat immigrant communities. It is worth noting that unlike elsewhere in Europe, Swedish voters distinguish between the positive economic benefits of immigration and a perceived connection to rising crime and insecurity. The second shift is that Swedes have become significantly more likely to say they want an end to privatisation in healthcare, schools and social services. Seven out of 10 Swedes now want the government to run healthcare, a clear revolt against the austerity and deregulation programmes of the past three decades. As an electoral strategy, the combined parties of the rightwing coalition now believe that they can win by moving the debate away from the economy and the Swedish welfare model, and on to the supposed threat migration poses to Swedish identity and traditional values. The centre-left opposition, meanwhile, is seeking to shift the conversation back to the economy, the welfare state and the number of nurses and teachers. And while this has helped it to its strongest position in polling for years, its silence on migration means the far right’s fearmongering narratives are also given a free pass. Magdalena Andersson, a former Social Democrat prime minister, tells me she thinks the best way to protect marginalised groups is to win elections. “And we won’t win elections if the conversation is solely about drag-queen story hours.” As prime minister, Andersson said the country had failed to integrate many of its immigrants, allowing a nation of segregated and “parallel societies” to emerge. The Social Democrats may have believed they could “neutralise” the far right by supporting stricter border controls and decreased immigration. Instead, this shifted the immigration debate irrevocably to the right, says Lisa Pelling. It has allowed the nationalists to advance a more radical agenda on other issues, including advocating for American-style gun laws, attacking LGBTQ+ people and reshaping culture policies around nationalist ideas. There are at least some indications that the combined right may have overreached. A grassroots protest movement recently emerged, with civil society organisations and thousands of citizens rallying against a new law that requires doctors, teachers and a wide range of public sector employees to report the presence of undocumented people even in hospitals or libraries. When this policy was first suggested by the far right, mainstream conservatives dismissed it as the Stasi-style tactics of tyrants and old communist regimes. Now they support it. People refusing to act as informants in a system they see as becoming inherently xenophobic are perhaps the voice of Sweden’s new silent majority, belatedly organising to sustain a tolerant society. In any case, the outcry should be a reminder that culture wars can backfire on those who stoke them. Some Swedish conservatives are asking if it has all gone too far: Magnus Jacobsson, a centre-right member of the Riksdag, recently accused his own side of stoking the fires of xenophobia, blaming immigrants for problems with much more complex roots. But once unleashed, the culture wars rarely retreat from public life. “It is too easy to dismiss these debates as something that revolves around symbols. They are actually about what kind of society we want to live in,” says Johansson Heinö. Swedish politics is not as grimly polarised as the US’s yet, but the vitriol that has risen to the surface in recent years is probably here to stay. Martin Gelin is the US correspondent of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the author of Den vita stormen: Rasismens historia och USA’s fall (The White Storm: How Racism Poisoned American Democracy)