“We are on track to win,” Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the radical right Sweden Democrats, told supporters at the party’s annual November congress. “In recent weeks we have seen how the other parties, and especially the Social Democrats and the Conservatives have approached our standpoints on immigration policy at a furious pace. Essential parts of our immigration policy are now being put in place by the Social Democratic government.”

Four days earlier, the red-green coalition government had presented a new package of drastic measures to lower the number of refugees granted asylum in Sweden, in an effort to mitigate increasing popular support for the radical right. Perhaps the Sweden Democrats are not on track to victory, whatever that means, but there is little doubt they have now established themselves as the country’s third largest party, and wield enough power to scare social democrats into doing their work for them.

If you want to explain the dramatic sharpening of Sweden’s asylum policy, it is not enough to point to the small country’s acceptance of more than a hundred thousand refugees (mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq) over the course of three autumn months. Despite the pressure this has placed on officials — imagine the US taking in 3.3 million refugees in the same short period — the recent reversal would not have happened without the political threat posed by the Sweden Democrats.