Civics: Sweden’s Decades-Long Failure to Integrate

Leonod Bershidsky:

Burhan Yildiz, a leader of more than 4,000 Kurds living in the Stockholm suburbs of Tensta and Rinkeby, claims he knows people who voted this year for the Sweden Democrats, the nationalist party whose improving electoral performance has thrown Swedish politics into disarray.

“They are angry about the criminality,” Yildiz said of the nationalists’ local voters. “They think where every other party has failed, the Swedish Democrats will manage to kick those who don’t respect the law out of the country.”

Yildiz has lived in the area for 29 of his 55 years and knows everyone, but a search for those who backed the Sweden Democrats in the September parliamentary election would be a tall order even for him. In the nine electoral districts in Tensta, where Yildiz and I spent part of an afternoon drinking Turkish-style tea, just 302 people out of the 5,907 who cast valid ballots supported the nationalists. More than 19,000 people, most of them immigrants or children of immigrants, live in Tensta. Many of them aren’t entitled to vote, and even those who are often don’t: While the turnout was 87 percent nationwide, it only reached 56 percent in Tensta.