AUF leader Gaute Børstad Skjervø believes that young Swedes are moving to the left for ideological reasons.
Skjervø predicts that the West is facing one of the biggest left-wing waves in many decades.
– We are seeing indications of this in the support for Zohran Mamdani in the United States, he tells FriFagbevegelse.
According to Swedish researcher Tobias Hübinette, much of the shift is about something else: about who is actually young in Sweden today.
Share with immigrant background has doubled
Statistics Sweden (SCB) figures show that 40–43 per cent of Swedes under the age of 50 have a foreign background, meaning that they were born abroad, or were born in Sweden with at least one foreign-born parent.
Among Swedes in their 50s, the proportion is around 22 per cent. That is roughly half as many.
The proportion with a background outside Europe has grown particularly rapidly. It rose from around 3 per cent of voters in 2002 to more than 13 per cent in this year’s election, according to Bulletin.
The growth has been driven by around 200,000 new Swedish citizenships since 2022, most of them among people with backgrounds outside Europe. Many of them have now voted for the first time in a Riksdag election.
70 per cent to the left
SVT’s election-day survey shows that voters with backgrounds outside Europe voted overwhelmingly for the red-green side. 38 per cent voted for Socialdemokraterna, 21 per cent for Vänsterpartiet and 7 per cent for Miljöpartiet. In total, around 70 per cent voted for the opposition.
Among voters who identify themselves as Muslims, the proportion was even higher. Around 85–86 per cent sympathised with the opposition parties, compared with less than 4 per cent for the Tidö bloc, according to a Novus poll from July.
– Will continue to decline
Hübinette is a co-founder of the left-wing website Expo and researches ‘whiteness’ at Karlstad University. In several posts this week, he has argued that Sverigedemokraterna’s decline among young people is primarily due to the fact that the younger cohorts have a different composition from older voters.
He writes that voters with backgrounds outside Europe vote for SD to a far lesser extent than ethnic Swedes. This also applies in comparison with Nordic and European immigrants.
Hübinette predicts that the party’s support among young people ‘will simply continue to decline’ as the composition of the younger cohorts changes.
Document has previously reported on Hübinette’s view that immigrants in general secured the opposition’s election victory.
Gaute Børstad Skjervø, who will shortly step down as AUF leader, however, sees this differently in the world in which he lives.
– Many young people who were shaped by the rightward wind during Covid have had enough, he says, adding that he believes this ‘leftward wind’ will also spread to Norway.
