Brexit… Trump…
Meanwhile, in Sweden:
Sweden’s far-right party is rejoicing: long shunned by the political establishment, it has suddenly been invited in from the cold by a main opposition party eyeing a return to power — and Swedish politics is all shook up.
Breaking a longstanding taboo, Sweden’s conservative Moderate Party last week opened the door for a cooperation with the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, causing a deep rift within the stunned four-party centre-right opposition Alliance.
All of the political parties in parliament have long held a cordon sanitaire around the Sweden Democrats because of its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, but Moderates leader Anna Kinberg Batra argued the party could no longer be ignored….
As Sweden took in the highest number of refugees per capita in Europe in 2015, the Sweden Democrats have seen their popularity soar. A recent poll credited them with 21 percent of voter sympathies, making them the country’s second-biggest party after the Social Democrats.
They first entered parliament in 2010 with 5.7 percent of votes, rising to nearly 13 percent in the 2014 election….
A poll on Tuesday showed six out of 10 Moderates voters support a cooperation with the far-right.
And then a sentence symbolically reflecting the West far beyond Sweden:
The Centre and Liberal parties fiercely oppose the move, while the small Christian Democrats said they would accept the Sweden Democrats’ indirect support but would not negotiate with them.