Via – Yahoo! News

The far-Right Sweden Democrats party is now within a hair’s breadth of becoming Sweden’s biggest political party as it uses the five towns where it won its first political power last election to mount a series of un-PC political stunts. 

In an interview last week, the party’s well-presented, charismatic leader Jimmie Åkesson put his party’s sharp upswing down to the ‘Solvesborg-effect’ – named after his pretty hometown in southern Sweden, where his fiancée Louise Erixon now serves as mayor. 

“There is a Solvesborg-effect,” he told the Aftonbladet newspaper. “A lot of people see what we do when we have the chance to govern, and they appreciate what they see.”

In Sölvesborg, the party has moved to stop flying the rainbow flag once a year to celebrate Stockholm’s gay pride festival, has said it will stop purchasing “provocative, challenging” public art, and has banned children from wearing Islamic headdress. 

While largely symbolic, these policies have won huge national media attention, with gay rights groups now planning to hold the first Pride march in the southern city next May. 

Gitte Ørskou, the head of Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s main modern art gallery, likened the new art policy to 1930s Germany, “where that which was not approved of by the political establishment was called ‘degenerate art'”. 

Sofia Lenninger, the head of Sölvesborg’s culture department, was sacked shortly after telling the Telegraph of her opposition with the new policy. 

“I think it makes everything a bit boring, actually,” she said. “What’s the point, if you have to be aware of being provocative when dealing with art?”.

But in interviews, Ms Erixon has welcomed the controversy.

“There’s a big division between what the general public thinks is beautiful and interesting, and what a tiny cultural elite thinks is exciting,” she said of the art ban when given Swedish Radio’s major weekly interview slot. 

“What happens in Sölvesborg is not random,” Anders Sannerstedt, Senior Lecturer at Lund University, saíd of the party’s local policies. “I think it is fair to assume that there is a national strategy behind it.” 

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