*Some interviewees asked that their surnames be withheld because of the political nature of the interviews. Malmo, Sweden – A very Swedish political tradition is playing out in Malmo, the country’s third-largest city. Rows of twee campaign booths, known as “election cottages”, are packed into a corner of the central square.
National polls have Sunday’s election on a knife-edge, with the centre-left opposition bloc led by the Social Democrats just a few percentage points ahead of the right-wing group – a gap that has tightened over the past month. In the middle of the row, representatives of the Left Party and the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), bitter rivals from opposite ends of the political spectrum, campaign a metre apart. Migration is a key election issue.
Multicultural Malmo, with more than a third of the city’s 368,000 residents born outside Sweden, has become the centre of the debate. For the right, the city represents failures of integration, a cautionary tale it says of what happens when immigration goes unchecked. Beyond Sweden, Malmo draws disproportionate interest.
In 2017, the populist English politician Nigel Farage branded it the “rape capital of Europe”, a claim a leading Swedish criminologist dismissed as nonsense, while Germany’s far-right AfD has used it in its narratives about the dangers of immigration. In the city’s town hall, a grand building with a Dutch Renaissance-style facade, Anfal Mahdi, an opposition councillor in Malmo for the Left Party, sits amid the splendour of green velvet chairs, historical oil paintings and royal portraits. Right-wing politicians ignore the socioeconomic challenges of living in the areas built under Sweden’s “Million Programme”, she said, referring to an ambitious scheme to build one million new homes between 1965 and 1974.
It began as a social housing initiative for working-class Swedish families. In later decades, as many of those families moved out, the apartments were allocated to migrant and refugee newcomers. Observers say what began as a utopian welfare project gradually became the physical framework of today’s segregated suburbs.
Mahdi, whose family fled Iraq after the Gulf War, grew up in one of these areas during cuts to the welfare state that had defined modern Sweden, as public spending tightened after its early-1990s economic crisis. But what they lacked in welfare, they made up for in diversity, she said. The city’s most famous son, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, grew up in Rosengard, a Million Programme estate on Malmo’s eastern side that police still classify as a “particularly vulnerable area”.
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