Responses to the riots that flared in Swedish cities last week had a dreary predictability. Conservatives blamed Sweden's model of social protection and tolerance, its traditional open door to immigrants, the cosseting of the underclass, themes embellished by the far-right Swedish Democrats. Centre-right Moderate Party prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, dismissed the riots as "hooliganism".
Yet the vaunted Swedish model has taken a battering in the recession and has a distinctly bedraggled look to it. And it is, in reality, the erosion of that safety net system, growing youth unemployment, and a dose of police insensitivity, that laid the basis for the alienation manifest on the streets. The riots in the Stockholm suburb of Husby were allegedly sparked by the shooting dead by police of a knife-wielding 69-year-old immigrant, and they then aggravated matters by calling angered young people “monkeys” and “negroes”.
Some €16 billion has been cut from taxes since 2005, largely at the expense of welfare. Unemployment stands at eight per cent, but is at least twice as high in immigrant areas. And the OECD recently reported that income inequality has grown faster in Sweden in the last 25 years than any other industrialised nation.
Sweden’s liberal immigration regime means that about 1.8 million of its 9.5 million people are first- or second-generation immigrants, and the country has taken in more than 11,000 refugees from Syria alone since 2012, more per head than any other EU state. A minority of both first and second generation have found integrating difficult and complain of discrimination. Life is far from easy.
But what is remarkable is not that some have rioted, but that so few have, compared to countries like France and the UK where the migrant intake has been significantly lower. Significantly, calm was restored in Husby when other members of the local immigrant community came out at night to patrol the area and engage the young people in dialogue. Sweden’s social compact remains largely intact.