Populist right parties are doing well in Scandinavia, but responses to them vary. The Danish People´s party was a crucial support party to the conservative government for ten years, and the Norwegian Progress Party recently entered government. The Sweden Democrats won 20 seats in the 2010 national elections, but are generally shunned by their political opponents. In all three countries these parties are striving to cross a threshold of credibility by presenting themselves as serious political contenders who have moved beyond the role of the protest party. Simultaneously they are performing a balancing act between challenging the established powers and trying to join them. In this paper we pay closer attention to how these balancing acts are working by analyzing their reception in mainstream news media. Drawing on theories of party competition and theories of political communication we analyze how prominent opinion makers in the public debate mediate the claims made by the three parties.
More specifically we analyze newspaper editorials from 2009-2012 in 12 Scandinavian newspapers. Performing a simple quantitative content analysis, we find that the political environment for the populist right is more repressive in Sweden than in Denmark and Norway, in the sense that mainstream media are uniformly negative towards the party and its role. Are the different responses merely a reflection of different party legacies and experiences of parliamentary work or do these differences express more fundamental differences between the countries as regards to discourses of national identity and immigration, in all countries the tone is particularly negative when these issues are discussed.
We then analyze the editorials through a qualitative frame analysis. While the frames identified differ between the countries, they share a sense of dilemma when facing these parties: Are they to be treated as ordinary political opponents or to be isolated and silenced?
