On September 9, 2018, Sweden's national government elections will be held. While, traditionally, the left-leaning Social Democrat party has done well in these elections (winning every one since 1917, in fact), this year, a new political force has forced its way into the spotlight. Pre-election polls show that the far-right, nativist party Sweden Democrats may get over 15% of the vote in tomorrow's election, which would make it the second largest political party in Sweden, behind the substantially weakened Social Democrats who are only polling at a little over 25%. Since the country appears to be in genuinely good shape (unemployment is the lowest in 10 years and the economy is growing at a solid 3% annually), why does such a substantial portion of Sweden's electorate feel that they need to abandon Sweden's current center-left government? Among other factors, many Swedes feel that Sweden's current acceptance of refugees from the Middle East and other poverty-stricken global regions is making Swedish society a generally more dangerous place.

In 2015 alone, Sweden accepted over 160,000 asylum seekers from Syria, Somalia, and other troubled, Muslim-majority nations. While this number may not seem large given the hundreds of millions of people who currently live in Europe, it was the second largest refugee intake per-capita in the continent. This staggering influx of foreigners, especially in a country that is over 90% Caucasian, has made many citizens fearful of the prospects of rising crime in immigrant communities and the difficulties of integrating the Muslim refugees into Swedish society. Gun-related murders have risen tenfold since the 1990's, with much of the violence amongst men in mainly immigrant neighbourhoods. Sex crimes against Swedish girls aged 15-17 rose by 46% in 2016, shortly after refugees began arriving in Sweden. Also jihadist attacks, such as the truck-ramming committed by Uzbek immigrant and ISIS supporter Rakhmat Akilov that killed five people in Stockholm last year, have done much to stoke negative sentiment against Muslim foreigners in Sweden. Rolf Hans Berg, an elderly Swedish man who supports the Sweden Democrats, has stated in an interview with CNN that "it's chaos here," specifically when referring to refugees coming to Sweden.

While more moderate Swedish politicians accuse the Sweden Democrats of pushing xenophobic and Islamophobic narratives, it should not be surprising that the aforementioned crime statistics as well as the persistent threat of terrorism are causing many fearful Swedish people to support the political party vowing to put Sweden first and minimize the intake of foreign asylum seekers.