Swedish Far Right's Conflicting Narratives on Native Identity Undermine Core Message
A new analysis of three Swedish far-right parties reveals internal contradictions in how they define who belongs to the nation—complicating their core anti-immigration pitch. The movements struggle to reconcile claims that Swedes are indigenous with the existence of actual indigenous minorities, a fault line that weakens their political coherence and messaging.
Originaltitel: Neither Swedes nor migrants: autochthonous minorities as a challenge to the Swedish far right
<p>Far-right movements in the West increasingly portray immigrants as 'colonizers' threatening supposedly 'indigenous' national majorities. These narratives are nevertheless complicated by long-settled minorities with legitimate claims to protection who resist colonization and assimilation by hegemonic majorities, including the self-victimized far right. Carlsson's article examines how three Swedish far-right movements construct autochthony-the idea of being native to the soil-in relation to long-settled indigenous and national minorities. Through an interpretive analysis of ideological manifestos, parliamentary motions and media statements by the Sweden Democrats, Alternative for Sweden and the Nordic Resistance Movement, it identifies three distinct discourses of autochthony: (1) transborder autochthony, which extends national belonging beyond Sweden's borders to groups abroad imagined as belonging to the nation-building project; (2) indigenous autochthony, where Swedes are framed as an indigenous people alongside the S & aacute;mi, whose belonging is confined to the far north; and (3) autochthonous Otherness, where Roma and Jews are cast as racialized outsiders or genocidal threats to serve the movements' broader exclusionary goals. The article argues that autochthony operates as a proxy for race, and that long-settled minorities disrupt far-right claims to belonging, revealing how migrant exclusion functions as a central logic shaping contemporary far-right ideologies towards other minorities.</p>