For the far-right Sweden Democrats, Sunday’s parliamentary elections may have looked like the final step toward full “detoxification.” Success in the election for the Riksdag promised to crown the party’s integration into the Swedish political system — a formality by this point, but a significant step nonetheless.

That integration had substantially taken place already four years ago, when a government coalition deal was agreed on at the Tidö Castle. The Sweden Democrats had previously been subject to a cordon sanitaire excluding them from office: the Moderate Party leader, Ulf Kristersson, even solemnly promised a Holocaust survivor that he would never cooperate with the far right. But after the 2022 elections, this pledge was ditched. Kristersson soon formed a coalition of traditional center-right parties (Moderates, Christian Democrats, and Liberals), which relied on the outside support of the Sweden Democrats, who had placed second in that vote.

The establishment was betting on moderating the far-right party. In reality, the opposite happened: the Sweden Democrats reaped the benefits of normalization, and the traditional right shifted to a harder line on immigration and criminal justice policy while also dismantling climate policies. This is no national peculiarity. Through European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s second term, we have seen a similar process in the EU institutions themselves, with a slew of deregulation, the shelving of the Green Deal, and a migration policy coordinated between Christian democracy and the various forces of the far-right front.