The Nordic countries are geographically, culturally and politically close, and have all witnessed an upsurge in support for radical right-wing parties over the past decades. Although the five parties: the Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party, the Icelandic Progressive Party, the Norwegian Progress Party, and the Sweden Democrats, are different when it comes to party history and how accepted they have been by other parties, they are today similar in their anti-immigration rhetoric, their critique of the established elites and to some extent their welfare chauvinism. According to theories on radical right-wing parties and environmental attitudes, caring for nature and the environment would make a person less probable to vote for a radical right-wing party. Using data from the European Social Survey, the relationship between environmental attitudes and radical right-wing support is examined. The initial results support this thesis, but when adding control variables the relationship is no longer significant. However, when looking at the countries separately, it shows that the relationship between environmental values and radical right-wing voting varies across the Nordic countries. Here, Norway stands out as the country with the strongest negative relationship between environmental values and support for radical right-wing parties.

The autumn 2015 represented a critical juncture for Swedish migration politics. Prime Minister Löfven’s government tightened immigration policies in accordance with proposals made since long by the radical right wing party the Sweden Democrats (SD). But did the critical juncture and the following migration policies involve new political strategies against SD, and how have the mainstream parties’ leaders’ perspective on immigration been affected? The analysis is based on systemic functional grammar and scholarly literature concerning perspectives on immigration. Policy proposals, party leaders’ perspectives on immigration and party leaders’ positioning in immigration-related television debates from 2014 and 2017 are compared. The results confirm previous research showing that there was a strong convergence amongst mainstream parties 2014, in migration politics as well as in positioning against SD. In 2017, the migration issue has split up into more detailed issues like family reunification, temporary residence permits and differentiated welfare. The utility perspective on immigration was salient in 2014. In 2017, two new central perspectives on immigration were constructed: the strain perspective and the reversed rights perspective. The study suggests that immigration-related issues has gone from being a forum for distance making between mainstream parties and SD, to be like any other issue – a forum for the usual political dynamics between governing parties and opposition.