There is an expression in Swedish, “to be let into the warmth” – meaning to be welcomed into the fold. In a country shaped by long, dark winters, the image speaks for itself.

A decade ago, the Sweden Democrats (SD), a far-right anti-immigration party with roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement, were firmly shut out in the cold.

But after the 2018 general election, a political deadlock prompted right-wing parties to rethink their alliances – and their principles.

Today, SD is Sweden’s second-largest party, providing the parliamentary support that keeps the current government in power. It is a party once shunned by every major political force, now far into the warmth.

From skinheads to suits

SD were founded in the 1980s by Nazi sympathisers and born out of the far-right, skinhead movement “Keep Sweden Swedish”.

Its first auditor, Gustaf Ekstrom, was a veteran of the armed combat branch of the SS, a key organisation of Nazi Germany, and other executive members had belonged to violent far-right movements.

After the 1990s, SD attempted to “clean up their act” in order to escape being seen as neo-Nazis, Morgan Finnsio, a Swedish researcher who studies far-right movements at the Expo Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

One example he gave is their 2003 adoption of the idea of “open Swedishness”, meaning that Swedish identity is not biologically exclusive and that assimilation is – theoretically – possible, explained Finnsio.

In the period from 2014 until 2020, SD made further cosmetic changes and gestures towards moderation, rebranding themselves as a “conservative” party, he said.

SD’s leadership expelled the party’s youth wing for “extremism”, threw out some members, albeit inconsistently, and discouraged the sharing of far-right alternative media content, Finnsio said.

It also dropped its demand to leave the European Union and its opposition to NATO membership.

Daphne Halikiopoulou, chair in comparative politics at the University of York in England, told Al Jazeera that SD has trodden the same path as several other European hard far-right political parties, gradually altering their rhetoric and repackaging themselves as borderline far-right.

The party, she said, has “cleansed itself of its extremist elements” and rebranded itself with an innocent-looking flower as its logo, rather than a Viking.

Political inroads

In September 2010, SD crossed the 4 percent threshold and entered parliament for the first time, winning 20 seats.

Having spent years forming a narrative linking immigration to crime, terrorism and national security, the 2015 refugee crisis handed the SD the moment they had been waiting for.

That year, an estimated 1.3 million asylum seekers arrived in Europe. In Sweden alone, 163,000 arrived – the highest annual figure in the country’s history and the largest per capita intake in the EU.

According to Sweden’s annual SOM survey, immigration became the single most important issue for 53 percent of Swedish voters almost overnight.

By the 2018 election, SD had capitalised, winning 17.5 percent of the vote and 62 seats – making them the third largest party.

It was at this point that SD, which had largely been treated as a “pariah party”, began to be welcomed into the political mainstream, Zina al-Dewany, a political commentator and editorial writer for the media outlet Aftonbladet, told Al Jazeera.

In a series of symbolic moments, one party after another changed its stance between 2018 and 2022, al-Dewany said.

This began with the Christian Democrats (KD) in July 2019 when its leader, Ebba Busch, met SD leader Jimmie Akesson for a face-to-face meal, a moment which became known as “the meatball lunch”.

The Moderate Party was next to reach out, with its head Ulf Kristersson – now Sweden’s prime minister – opting for a traditional Swedish fika, a Swedish coffee break with cinnamon buns and small talk – with Akesson in his office.

The seemingly banal setting carried political weight, signalling a breakdown of the cordon sanitaire and a broken promise that Kristersson had made to prominent psychologist, author and Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried in 2018 that he would never cooperate with the SD, which has a history of anti-Semitism.

The Tido agreement

Then, in October 2022, the liberals opened the door to the SD, and four right-wing party leaders secluded themselves inside the historic Tido Castle.

There they signed a landmark 62-page contract – known as the Tido Agreement – establishing Sweden’s current coalition government and enacting major policy shifts on crime and immigration.

The formal agreement had been made, but the Liberals still maintained a boundary: They would negotiate policies with SD, but they refused to serve in a formal government cabinet alongside them.

The final embrace

Then, in May 2026, that final boundary was finally broken when Simona Mohamsson, the leader of the Liberals and minister for education and integration, announced that her party would allow SD to participate in a future government.

Afterwards, on live television, Akesson offered a handshake. Mohamsson embraced him, a moment that sent political shockwaves across Sweden, in part because of who the politicians were and what they represented.

Simona Mohamsson, born in Germany to a Palestinian father and mother from Lebanon, moved to Sweden when she was eight and was known for her antiracist activism and social liberalism. Earlier in her career, she campaigned against the far right and opposed SD. As recently as October, in an opinion piece, she said she does not want SD in government as they “do not behave”.

Even after her public announcement, at an internal party meeting, she conceded that SD were not her first choice: “They have many members who do not see me as Swedish,” she is reported to have said, according to Sweden’s public broadcaster.

Normalisation of far-right ideology

Since the Tido Agreement, SD have become embedded in government decision-making, functioning as part of the governing apparatus and as a “shadow government”, al-Dewany explained.

Its influence is particularly visible in criminal justice, where it has backed tougher sentencing and expanded incarceration. It has pushed to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13, though after failing to secure enough parliamentary support, the government settled on 14, still a significant drop from the previous threshold of 15.

SD’s makeover has also seen other right-wing parties embrace the party and echo much of its rhetoric.

Finnsio, the researcher, said that in particular the Moderates and KD have adopted “the political meta-narrative that migration – and migrants, especially those who ‘fail to integrate’ – is at the heart of virtually every social and economic problem in Sweden”.

“Thus we get Moderate political messaging cheerfully boasting about having brought levels of so-called ‘asylum immigration’ to record lows – a kind of rhetoric that was unthinkable in Swedish politics before the success of the SD”, he said.

The Moderates have for years been linking the issue of crime – their top priority in government – to migration, and KD have adopted the theme that Sweden’s social problems are in large part due to a failure of the majority to forcefully assert “Swedish and Christian values” supposedly challenged by migration, he explained.

Al-Dewany said that as mainstream parties normalise SD, they also normalise its policies, imperilling people with foreign backgrounds. There has also been increased bullying of schoolchildren and a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, she added.

Assimilation not integration

Laced in right-wing rhetoric around immigration is the subject of integration – but Tanvir Mansur, a Swedish political journalist and commentator, argues that what is actually meant by the term is assimilation.

Mansur, who also creates content about loneliness and social belonging in Sweden, illustrates the point through the workplace.

A person of colour, he said, often finds themselves as the only one – or one of very few – without the same cultural references as their colleagues.

Conversations about summer houses and ski trips over fikas can leave them feeling like outsiders. And to truly fit in, the pressure is clear: “You would have to change the way you speak, to speak in a more white-sounding voice – and then you would have to learn these references,” he said.

He views Mohamsson’s embrace of SD as an example of this – an “overcompensation” to prove how Swedish she is, a “nationalist mask, just like we would put on a Swedish mask in the workplace”.

It is a desire that goes back further in her family than politics. When they moved from Hamburg to Sweden, her father, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, changed the family name from Mohammed to Mohamsson.

Al-Dewany said some of the policies pushed by the right-wing government, such as recent deportations of young people – some of whom arrived as children and have spent most of their lives in the country – show that they are directly targeting people who are “not ethnic Swedes”.

Mansur argues that the Sweden Democrats are not the origin of Swedish racism, but a symptom of something much older.

Sweden, he points out, was involved in the transatlantic slave trade and was home to the State Institute for Racial Biology, which operated from 1922 to 1959 and used craniometry – the measuring of skulls and physical features – to classify people by race and legitimise eugenics.

After World War II, he says, anything to do with race was quietly swept aside, and a new national myth took its place, one that ignored the historical treatment of the Sami, the Roma, and Black Swedes alike.

“We’ve had this self-image of Sweden as a humanitarian superpower,” he said, “when that hasn’t really been the truth.”

Upcoming elections

Al-Dewany believes that even voters with right-wing sympathies may feel the current government has overreached with some of its harsher immigration policies.

The deportations of young people in particular have provoked a public backlash, and polls now suggest the left-wing opposition bloc is on course to win September’s election, which would end SD’s formal grip on power.

But for Mansur, the deeper question is not about one party or one election. He points to Nooshi Dadgostar, the leader of the Left Party, who is of Iranian origin. “I’ve never heard her talk about being Iranian, or Persian culture, or her language, or anything,” he said.

“That’s kind of today’s Swedish culture – trying not to stand out, trying to be as Swedish as possible,” he said.

“You should be able to be yourself, no matter who you are – whatever your cultural background or faith,” he added. “That’s not what it should be like, being a citizen or someone who lives in Sweden.”