Taking the Folkhem Back: Welfare Chauvinism in Sweden from an Intersectional Perspective

The concept of folkhem (home/house of [Swedish] people) is deeply seated in Swedish political discourse and makes an explicit reference to the Swedish welfare system and how this has been achieved. It also makes an implicit reference to the Swedish people inhabiting it, and their inherent Swedishness – employed as a discrete ethnic marker to distinguish between ethnic Swedes and the country’s ethnic Others (Andersson 2009; Hellström & Nilsson 2010; Norocel 2013). The present piece is a longitudinal qualitative analysis that investigates how the said concept has been employed by the populist radical right party Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) in ensuring its electoral success in the past elections. The empirical material employed here is constituted by the discourses of the SD leader in the party’s main media outlet, SD-Kuriren (SD-K), focuses on a well-defined timeframe: from the election campaign prior to the 2006 Swedish parliamentary elections to the 2014 Swedish parliamentary elections, thereby accounting for the more subtle changes that occurred under the impact of the economic crisis in Sweden. The article consequently explores the discursive redefinitions of the folkhem to entail a nationalist welfare chauvinistic project – allowing the SD to claim ‘Sweden back’. Consequently, the folkhem – the socio-political equality and gender equality project – appears depicted on the brink of collapse at the hands of allegedly undeserving ethnic Others. In so doing, the present intersectional analysis discussed the specificity of interrelated systems of difference based on gender, ethnicity/race, social class and sexuality in the conceptualization of the folkhem by the radical right populist discourses in Sweden.