Using a cunning election strategy, the pro-Islamic Nuance party seeks to enter the Swedish parliament by harvesting the votes of Turkish-born residents.
The Swedish Muslim Party Nuance has launched an election campaign in Turkey in a bid to enter the Swedish parliament next year, the party leader, Mikail Yüksel, announced on TikTok.
Nuance has put up several posters and banners in Yüksel's hometown of Kulu in central Turkey. The reason is that many Turks and Kurds living in Sweden visit the city during the summer when they travel home to meet relatives and friends.
“With only 23,000 votes, we can enter the Riksdag,” the posters say.
The Nuance party is betting on Sweden's Muslim community to allow it to enter parliament. The party hopes to reach the Riksdag by getting at least 12 percent of the votes in Malmö municipality's parliamentary constituency and thus circumvent the ordinary parliamentary barrier of 4 percent. That would require about 23,000 votes in the constituency, which has a vast Muslim diaspora.
Before launching Nuance in 2019, Mikail Yüksel was a senior member of the Centre Party. However, he was forced to step down following accusations of secret contacts with the Grey Wolves, a Turkish nationalist group.
The party lists the following issues among those it considers most important: combating Afrophobia and Islamophobia, solving the housing crisis, and boosting integration. The party is firmly pro-EU and pro-Palestine in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.
Earlier, Yüksel spelled out his personal standpoint in an opinion piece, blaming the establishment for “failing the multicultural society” and identified “growing populism” and “xenophobic rhetoric” as the roots of evil in Swedish society. In response, he pledged to avoid established ideologies.
All in all, over 50,000 people living in Sweden were born in Turkey. In addition, many Syrians and Iraqis travel via Turkey when they go on holiday to their home countries. The overall percentage of Muslims in Sweden has been estimated at over 8 percent, or over 800,000.
Due to Sweden's liberal immigration policies of recent decades, the share of immigrants and their descendants has increased from completely negligent numbers to about a quarter of the population of 10 million.
