Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. Nationalist, sure.
I'm not Swedish though, so I would be interested in the thoughts of those who are actually affected by Örebropartiet's policies.
To me too, then I got to the leaders quote on TV: "We must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
Yeah, okay. I know some politicians who speak like that, I feel I get the picture.
Its 4chan politically incorrect. https://boards.4chan.org/pol/
And yeah, its as terrible as you can possibly imagine. And then even more so.
Now whether that's all true, has always been true, is propaganda...whatever, but it's easy for me to understand why sentiment has been changing as the spotlight is focused more and more on the abuse of the systems as opposed to the benefits.
I also think there's some 'hierarchy of needs' going on here, where as the economy shifts and more and more Americans are struggling to afford housing, groceries, and other necessities, it's easy to feel like you should be putting yourself first over strangers. Combine that with the prior point, and you have a great recipe to build resentment. Selfish, maybe, but I can understand how you get there.
This is NOT to say 'There is no xenophobia' or anything...racism in general is alive and well in the USA... but I have pretty sound-minded people around me starting to echo this mindset, and this is my best understanding of what's been brewing.
Humans en masse are selfish, self-serving, and tribal, so it's incredibly easy to believe that there is massive abuse of social services like SNAP/EBT, those delivering services are incompetent, and that we should investment more in fraud reduction.
However, the reality is that the US spends $3.75 for each $1 of fraud discovered. And, "fraud" includes clerical errors made by the government, so the actual ROI of enforcement is even lower.
So much of the propaganda -- "immigrants steal benefits paid for by hardworking US taxpayers, so we should ramp up enforcement spending to make more room for [white] citizens" is designed to simply reinforce our biases because it's just so darned believable to a cynical and tribal people.
In reality, spending more on benefits enforcement just loses taxpayers more money while cutting more US citizens off from benefits they both need and are eligible for. It results in the opposite of its stated goal and this is well known to any policymaker.
So if saving taxpayer money, and punishing those guilty of fraud, isn't the actual objective of all this toxic propaganda, you have to ask yourself what is.
in Germany we talk 350Mio€ vs 10Bio€ y/y
the us numbers will have a similar ratio
Migration is all a distraction anyway. Brown people existing doesn't hurt you. Whenever you think they drive up rents or whatever, that has nothing to do with the brown people, that has everything to do with the system that sets rents.
Some economists theorize that a long time Mayor of Boston (James Curley) used economic populism (taxing wealthy people of English descent and redistributing to poorer, usually of Irish descent) and anti-British rhetoric to reshape the electorate in ways that benefited him, even if it didn't benefit the city as a whole. The theory goes, he had a plan to drive out the wealthy people of English descent so the poor people of Irish descent would make up a larger share of the electorate and he could win more elections.
My understanding is that even most economists think that this isn't actually real. It's largely a couple of economists building a mathematical model, and then looking at cherry-picked examples, e.g., minority mayors during the 1970's and assuming that it was the result of a dastardly plan by the minority mayors rather than the result of larger social forces driving White Flight from cities.
In general, I think that mayors might make dumb decisions, but they largely do it because they think it will be good for the city and are wrong, not because they are twirling their mustache and cackling away.
And the demand is not just for doctors and other highly credentialed labor. The most nativist work on the Mariel Boatlift (3) (by Borjas) only found a decrease in wages for native-born high-school dropouts, and the general consensus of other economists seems to be that his work was faulty. The general consensus on Mariel (cite fn2 again) is that it was good, economically, for the native-born people in the Miami labor force when an additional 7% of the labor force suddenly arrived as immigrants over the course of a few months.
1: How much housing can be built legally is the key factor here. Immigrants can drive up the prices if no more housing can be built but that's just another way of saying that "no more housing can be built" is a really terrible policy that is enormously destructive. If building housing is relatively easy, then it doesn't drive up prices. In fact, immigrant labor is often used to build this new housing. Don't let your area become like the Bay Area and you'll be fine.
2: Wearing my physics hat, I am not comfortable saying that anything in economics is actually proven.
When people are added to the economy, demand increases, including demand for more labor.
The downward pressure on wages that one might intuitively expect from immigrant labor is basically erased by those increases in demand. It's self-reinforcing.
I'm pretty sure he meant that what used to be a far-right view is now considered mainstream. Which is true, since even the EU Parliament has now begun passing laws vs migrants, and governments all across Western Europe are now taking steps against migrants.
> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
Correct, and I'm one of them. Unfortunately some abhorrent elements of our culture, traditions and values hurt erstwhile peaceful societies.
Why did you feel the need to say "Brown people" instead of migrants? Are you trying to play the racist card? Poles are white and when they migrated en mass to Britain they were also making locals very unhappy.
Adjusting for purchasing power parity, GDP per capita in Poland isn't far behind the UK.
Likewise, it was a labour union in Georgia that lobbied to get Koreans deported from the US. It should be unsurprising that those who hold to the Lump of Labor economic school should oppose immigration and that's quite popular among the left-wing.
Don't make the mistake of assuming moderator omniscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)! - we don't see most of what gets posted to HN, and we mostly don't read the threads sequentially.
When this comes up, it's usually because someone (yourself in this case) saw X getting moderated and Y not getting moderated, and derived signal from that, when in fact it is nearly always noise.
By deriving signal, I mean bogus conclusions such as "the mods treat X side harder than Y side", or "the mods must secretly be aligned with Y". This is all non sequitur. Overwhelmingly, what you're seeing is randomness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion) - but especially easy to overinterpret because of the strong feelings generated by the underlying topic.
There's a well-established process for letting the mods know about posts that might need moderator attention - see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I do like a good political debate, but it was a bad call unflagging a politically charged topic which has no chance to develop into a productive discussion if minimum moderating standards can't be met.
In Sweden, brown people are heavily overrepresented in violent crime, so many people are getting hurt.
Obligatory disclaimer: the problem is not caused by skin color, but by a complex mess of poverty, lack of opportunity, societal attitudes within and against immigrant groups, etc. But voters hearing about a steady drum beat of robberies, rapes, drive by shootings (yes, in Sweden!) don't really care.
Scapegoating entire skin colors for systemic failures doesn't seem like it's going to make things better for anyone.
Yes, existing doesn't hurt. But when you import mass amounts of people who don't talk your countries language, have no intention of learning, and have no intention of getting a job, and on top of it are intensely religious supporting a religion which is antithetical to your values, then it DOES hurt.
Western Europe has simply allowed too many Muslim immigrants in than they could ever successfully have integrated. Now Europe is full of ghettos of Muslim immigrants who don't get jobs, don't learn the languages, and sap resources which the countries cannot afford.
Note: this isn't about being racist or not, it's just common sense. There is a limit of how many immigrants a country can take, financially and culturally.
I'd agree immigration must have limits and don't recall any prominent voices calling for unlimited migration or even limitless compassion.
Being a union, one can hope the load of migrants fleeing wars and violence would be spread among all the states, in proportion to their ability. Economic migration is a more complex matter since everyone benefits from it up to some threshold. Where it crosses into an undeniable problem is subjective. If it negatively affects me personally then it's bad, especially if I can overlook all the benefits I accrued (like lower prices of commodities and services).
BBC:
About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.
What happened is that the far-right -- and, lets not use euphemisms like "the far right" here, we're talking about fascists and literal Nazis (ethno-fascism is Nazism) -- have successfully taken control of much of our mass media. They've also more or less captured the government of one of the world's super powers. Those two things put together have allowed them to make their views appear mainstream.
This is exactly what happened during the 1920s and 1930s prior to World War II. And similarly, you were finding Nazi views expressed openly and proudly and being given a veneer of respectability. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...)
But they are no less extreme now than they were then. They are still fascist and Nazi views. And they still ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves a decent human being.
Allsides even lists the AP as left leaning, though I don't ingest enough direct AP stuff to verify. I'd disagree with them listing the BBC as neutral on quite a few topics, nowadays, and put them towards left - but that's just me.
Sure, there are right-leaning places like The National Review, but apart from the opinion section of the WSJ and Fox News as a whole they're pretty small.
A lot of the rest you list are not left leaning, but centrist (derogatory).
You could make an argument that some of them are "classical liberal" or "neoliberal", but that was the center in the US and everywhere else it is center-right.
Definitions are helpful here.
"Classical liberal" is what the US was founded as. It was a liberal Republic. Classical liberals value political freedoms, civil rights, and free markets. They are anti-monarchy and anti-authoritarian. Most of the revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s were driven by Classical Liberals seeking political freedom
In the origination of "left" and "right", Classical Liberals were "center left". "Center right" were the moderate constitutional monarchists. In the US where we have zero interest in constitutional monarchy, Classical Liberalism was always the center.
Since World War II, that center became a settled question in much of the western world. The answers are "Yes, constitutions", "Yes, political freedoms", and "Yes, civil rights". Though in many places, civil rights were incompletely extended and so much of the argument has been about extending them fully.
The other side of the argument is "the social question" which got rebranded as "economics". It boils down to how much do we allow power and wealth to concentrate. This became more and more of an element of the revolutions starting in the 1850s -- the revolutions of 1848 were the first to really feature a true left as it is understood today: socialist, communist, and anarchist. (At the time, it was just socialist. Communism as a theory didn't exist yet and anarchism was nascent.). And just to be clear, the "left" refers to Classical Liberals as "Bourgeoisie liberals" -- capitalists and capitalist defenders -- and does not consider them to be part of the left.
The center in the US since the 70s has been a neoliberal consensus which argues for allowing the Capitalist markets to do their thing with minimal intervention. And most of the debate has been about how much that minimal invention should be -- with the two sides mostly arguing between "almost none" and "minimal".
Neoliberalism is more or less a form of libertarianism (US Libertarianism edges into Anarcho-capitalism).
For all of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Neoliberalism was the center and was the entirety of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The "left" vs "right" argument was focused on things like foreign policy and whether we complete the extension of civil rights to everyone.
For most of those decades, all of those sources you just named arranged themselves squarely around that center. They were all Neoliberal. They all took rotating positions on foreign policy, aligning with each party based on the political winds of the moment. Many of them did include arguments in favor of the continued extension of civil rights, but many of them also included arguments against it. Few of them whole-heartedly endorsed that extension until after the fact.
We've never had much of a truly left mass media to speak of.
In the last decade and a half, authoritarianism, fascism, and neo-Nazism have seen a resurgence world wide. And in the US an explicitly fascist movement with Nazi elements captured the Republican party and then the government. Anyone with a political science background taking an honest, empirical look at the MAGA movement will identify it thus. That movement directly pulled from the Nazi playbook in their rise to power. Trump has often cribbed directly from Hitler's speeches, barely even paraphrasing them.
During that movements rise to power, we have seen large elements of the wealthy elite that controls much of the media align with that movement.
At this point, most social media sites are controlled by actors who either have explicitly aligned with the US fascist movement or have effectively acquiesced to it.
Meta has added fascist aligned members to its board and put fascist aligned people in executive positions through the company. They've also voluntarily acquiesced to the regime's requests to silence anti-regime activists.
Twitter is explicitly fascist. Elon Musk is a core member of that movement.
TikTok has been captured by that movement through an orchestrated buyout.
Most of our media is social media, and right there you now have the biggest source of news and information for the vast majority of people fully captured by the fascist movement.
As for traditional media, CBS has been captured. Bari Weiss is a part of the fascist movement and her elevation was part of their pressure campaign.
The Washington Post is owned by Bezos who has aligned with that movement and is explicitly exerting editorial control.
News Corp (Fox News and the WSJ) is aligned with the fascist movement and is arguably one of its originators. Sinclair group, which owns most local TV stations, is also aligned with that movement.
And to be clear, I watched this happen. I've long made a habit of subscribing to sources from across the spectrum and made a hobby study of political science and trying to identify source's biases by political taxonomy vs the frustratingly simplistic left / right spectrum. I used to subscribe to The National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, the Weekly Standard, and others. I've largely tried to avoid those that are blatant, ingenuine propaganda (which Fox News has always been) in favor of those making earnest well founded arguments. And one by one, I've watched them fall to the fascist movement over the last decade. Reason is the last hold out, truly committed to civil liberties and libertarianism -- though it hasn't yet recognized the fascist movement for what it is (or hadn't last I checked in on them -- I haven't had the time to read as much lately).
It's pretty clear that you're in the fascist propaganda bubble, based on your posts and where you put things, and that is badly skewing your perception of where the center is.
I would strongly encourage you to get out of that bubble.
I personally have individual beliefs that align with both of our two major political parties, which is something very few people can actually say, for what it's worth.
The days of a scrappy newspaper or local market newscast are over. Reframe your statement from "People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left" to "People who own media firms tend to be on the right. People who set journalistic standards for their outlet tend to be on the right."
I was caught quite off-guard by this new "open borders" perspective. It doesn't seem sustainable at all.
Look at the huge jump due to his policies: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20240127_EPC...
The same was not true for Obama, who was actually much better than Bush.
Trump: "Border is closed. We're deporting people, starting with mostly those that have committed serious crimes."
How did it do that?
The main point is that Biden acted like his hands were tied and Trump showed that they clearly weren't, and that we already had the tools to effectively shut down illegal immigration (through the border, at least).
The in-effectivity was due entirely and directly to Trump interfering in the matter. How can a president sign legislation that doesn't reach his desk because the party in control of the legislative body is in the pocket of a man who cares more about his career than the nation's well-being?
- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...
- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...
- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...
(Also, FWIW, those immigration surges were good things (for the US), and likely helped the US stick the "soft landing" instead of slipping into a post-covid recession)
It doesn't show up in the short term numbers because it is a long-term solution. But Americans aren't interested in long-term solutions.
One could easily argue that Trump made for more progress as far as the immigration courts being backed up by simply not having an almost completely open border like we did with Biden.
IIRC, the US-Mexico border was never open, but it was quite porous. People would come to the US, work for a season to make some money, then go home.
Then once border security started to be tightened, leaving was too risky so people would stay leading to a huge increase in the number of undocumented people living in the US.
I think there's probably some leftist argument against this system on account of how we're taking advantage of poor countries and something something workers rights, but I think removing the ability to leave, to go home is the worst of both worlds.
They run counter to the notion of sovereignty and local agency which we value greatly in the US
The irrationality of strict country borders and heavy migration controls will emerge as a heavy global challenge due to economic and climate migration and aging populations
I don't think we have a good answer for what replaces them, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to state that hasty decisions made after WWI and WWII should forever govern global human freedoms - and we need a better approach than war to renegotiate some of this
For example the Bible defined borders of "The Land of Israel" which are still fought over today: https://www.biblica.com/bible/?osis=niv:Ezekiel%2047:13%E2%8...
The "Eternal Treaty" between the Hittites and Egyptians defined spheres of influence and position of various cities
The Peace of Antalcidas defined the border between Greek and Persian influence and assigned various cities to different powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Antalcidas#Effects
One of the biggest drivers of strict borders was tax collection: they defined who could collect tax from which subjects. This was a common source of conflict and so anywhere feudalism was practiced strong border definitions were strongly enforced.
It's possible the grandparent is talking more about the idea of limiting travel across those borders. That is a more defensible position but even then it was more about the the costs of enforcement.
Trade routes had very strong border enforcement because the borders were places taxes were collected for example, and there were limits on who could travel various routes.
For example Venice, Genoa and the Ottoman Empire jealously protected European end of trade routes linking to the spice road.
> Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.
Note they say “to seek employment” and “without restrictive border controls”, not “for any purpose” and “without border controls”. This does not mean they’re advocating to let in convicted murderers or people who just want to migrate for welfare benefits. Calling it “open borders” is an exaggeration in absolute terms, though it is for sure accurate as a relative comparison to what we have now.
Also, their political party, as such, is the Democrats. DSA is not a political party. But yeah they are members of DSA as well as being Democrats.
It's a very prevalent idea among US immigration activists and left-leaning people.
> what do they support exactly
Generally speaking, that people can move anywhere, if they want to. This article/interview/book covers it in more depth:
> Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is "the land for/belongs to the Swedes"
> In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes.
I don't think it's particularly hard to figure out what these are dog whistles for, and equating my vehement disagreement with it as being in favor of "open borders" is absurd.
I'm having trouble grokking your statement, but "open borders" is not a pejorative. It's a belief that people, more or less, should be able to freely flow across borders and live where they like.
Again, I am speaking from a US perspective. It may carry different connotations in other countries. It's too prescriptive to apply the same immigration policies at a global level. There's too much nuance and geographical differences.
Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.
So no, most migrant groups are not a big benefit. Especially considering that this is only taking the economy into account. When you take into account the societal disruption and anti-values that they bring with them, then its clear how negative they have been for Europe.
The Dutch were happy to do those jobs 50 years ago.
After every single "jobs the natives won't do", there's an unspoken "for the dogshit pay we offer."
It all sounds great until the last 40+ years goes away, with the apples year round and bananas, etc.
Going back to just what you can produce in your country is gunna be a rude awakening for billions.
You could force people to accept the low wages by removing all welfare but that has its own problems.
These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.
They're effectively the same thing.
Nationalism is a right wing concept.
The idea of changing immigration policies is not unique to any political party. However the quote isn't that, it's trying to stir up an angry us/them reaction at a large group based on national/racial lines. Also "damn parasites" is somewhat dehumanizing (whether you apply it to billionaires or immigrants).
I’ve listened a lot to talks from the party leader of Örebropartiet, and while I think he would benefit from slowing himself down, yell and insult less, I really can’t see he being racist or far-right. More leftist actually. I think he’s simply VERY motivated/obsessed around questions like to get government less corrupt, much more efficient governence, and to stop major ethnic groups from very poor parts of the world get an unreasonable high amount of the governments welfare spending.
I personally do not ever see myself voting for (or otherwise indirectly supporting) a politician that speaks like that, regardless of whether you can steelman it with more neutral language.
The fallacy is that there's only one direction, so to speak. You can be left without being an authoritarian. Of course, the same goes for the right.
Nobody is calling MacKenzie Scott a parasite.
Firstly, you should probably cite that. Searching for it leads here. Hopefully, you didn't manufacture it.
But, while the language is unfortunate, do you really think natives should tolerate migrants who are not a net positive?
I got it from reading the Wikipedia article linked in the comment I was replying to. Specifically here, third paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_...
The statement has a citation but I did not follow it.
>"class-conscious populism" which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology
which would have been called far left not long ago. Still I guess "far-right" means anti immigrant these days?
> Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations [...] to their place of racial ancestry
Sweden is the only country I'm aware of that has a Wikipedia page specifically about this incredibly niche local phenomenon which by the way has no correlation to anything being discussed here at all.
Scroll to the bottom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grenade_attacks_by_co...
And we're led to believe that Sweden has been under sustained attacks pretty much annually, except for the years between 1994 and 2002...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
which is literally kicking out people who don't look or sounds like me, out of the country.
Whenever that has happened it has been rather bad for most parties.
Or, more accurately, people who weren't born there (particularly first generation immigrants). No one's talking about legitimately doing deportations via family guy race cards.
- Markus Allard
Because, that is pretty core to the Swedish cultural identity.
Parallel societies have never been found to be a positive thing as far as I can tell.
What I don't understand is why integration is so poor in sweden(and the netherlands) compared to the UK. Outcomes for second generation swedes immigrant are terrible in education and employment.
There was a recent case where city of Malmo was building a hospital; during the building of the hospital it was decided that a splice of the oldest tree in the world would be installed.
A very expensive life-support system was developed and an enormous amount of money paid for the splice. (not including the life support system, which was also an inordinate amount).
The tree didn't take, and needs to be replaced.
It's called "Spruce Time": https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/region-skane-har-lag...
That's pretty far-right by itself. The fact that they want mass deportations should solidify it for you though.
(You might look at it and think, "if that is success, then how you define failure"? but don't forget, it took all of 12 years for the German Nazis to go from taking full control to having their country completely devastated.)
German Nazis were socialist in name only, to appeal to the working class.
Limiting immigration along with generous government benefits for citizens is an interesting new space for political parties not fitting the traditional left right axis.
Well that clears things up
There's a reason the Nazis included "socialist" in their name. It's not because they give a crap about the plebs.