I will do the - in Sweden - tradition handing out of ballots outside a nearby polling station tomorrow. There are ballots inside too, so it's purely symbolical. As usual I am running for something, this time for a seat on the regional council for the greens. Probably why they don't get a snarky presentation. Or maybe I am running on their ticket because I feel they're less deserving of snark?

Anyway, got to sleep.

Segregation, and slightly higher crime rates among immigrants didn't appear until after 1990, when Sweden abolished full employment policies.

Unlike the neolibs with their "job insecurity is good for you" and the socialists who've been emulating them for the past there decades, the far right parties have made full employment one of their main planks (this and the expected racism).

The unemployment rate among Sweden's "native-born" population was 4.8% as of September 2017, but 15.4% among the "foreign-born" population.  (Labor participation rate for native-borns: 83.7%; for foreign-borns: 78.4%.)

What accounts for this disparity in unemployment rate between "native-born" and "foreign-born" population? Government policy? Retail racism (implicit as well as overt)? Self-segregration by immigrant communities?

A quote by an "American-educated Somali immigrant who works as a policy analyst at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce,...  grew up and now lives in the suburb of Rinkeby-Tensta, where some 90 percent of residents have a foreign background, roughly 80 percent live on welfare or earn low incomes and 42 percent are under age 25":

"When I came here in 1998, to me this place was paradise. Today, I wouldn't want my children to grow up here."

For the past few months, the country has been bombarded on social media by an avalanche of trolls, fake news, misinformation and alternative facts - outright lies, in other words - as polling day approaches.

The origin of these attacks is obscure, though Sweden's cyber police have identified thousands of social media "bots", probably located abroad. But the trolls have a single theme - that Sweden is finished, falling apart, doomed. It is crime-ridden, and overrun by illegal immigrants. Its cities are no-go areas for police, and rape is at epidemic levels.

All of these claims are false, or misrepresent basic facts, and are contradicted by evidence, as the Swedish government and media have gone to great lengths to show. Yet the narrative the torrent of abuse has inspired, of Sweden as a nation in a deep crisis, has fed into the election campaign and aided the rise of a far-right party called the Sweden Democrats.

The Sweden Democrats are the latest addition to the ranks of Europe's resurgent hard right. They share its conservative-nationalist hostility to immigrants and the European Union, and an ideology tinged with scapegoating and anti-semitism. One of the party's founders was a Nazi, and others had ties to neo-fascist groups. That makes the party's rise to mainstream status as sinister as that of the Alternative for Germany faction that was the big winner in the German election last year.

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Some variant of that bogus we-want-our-country-back narrative has taken hold in Italy, America, Hungary, and even Germany. Now a growing number of Swedish voters appear to be in its grip, in response to the message that the country's widely admired model of equality and fairness is broken.

Yet the peddlers of that message are a political movement which offers nothing except the scapegoating of immigrants and the untenable, catch-all argument that the country is in "crisis". If they embrace the Sweden Democrats on Sunday, Swedish voters will deal a grievous blow to their country's progressive and liberal credentials, and to its image as a society to be emulated. The losers will be not just themselves, but the vital centre of European politics.

The people with the moral right to demand their country back - because they have really lost it - are Syrian and Rohingya refugees. If western societies refuse to acknowledge that fact, then they truly have lost all sense of proportion.

First districts are counted, but they are the smallest districts and I don't think it says anything.

And then to the thorny issue of forming a government. The smaller bloc may accept a government formed by the other, but it isn't certain. The far right may accept a right bloc government, but it isn't certain. The liberals and centre may accept the support of the far right, but it's a bit unlikely. And finally a cross bloc government could be formed, but that is rather unlikely. Or a new election may be called, which we haven't had for decades so no one knows how the voters would react.