Alternative for Sweden

Alternative for Sweden (, AFS) is a far-right political party in Sweden. It was founded in March 2018 by Gustav Kasselstrand and William Hahne, along with other members of the Sweden Democratic Youth, who were collectively expelled from the Sweden Democrats in 2015. It advocates the forced remigration of one million immigrants, and Sweden's withdrawal from the European Union. AfS ran in the general elections of 2018 and 2022, but failed to enter the Riksdag. With 0.26% of the vote, AfS is the second largest party without representation in the Riksdag. In the 2019 European Parliament election in Sweden the party ran on an anti-EU platform, receiving 0.46% of the vote. In November 2020, AfS announced its intention to run in the 2021 election to the Church of Sweden council. It won 1.26% of the votes, giving it 3 seats in the Church council. History Background In early April 2015, the Sweden Democrats (SD) accused its youth league, the Sweden Democrat Youth (SDU), of having relations with the far-right and ethnonationalist organization Nordic Youth (Swedish: ) which had been founded by members of the National Democrats, an ethnopluralist breakaway group from the SD. The SDU had also encountered repeated controversies of its members being accused of making racist statements. In response to these alleged relations, SD threatened to expel several leading members of SDU unless the league moderated itself. SDU's leader Gustav Kasselstrand, and its deputy leader William Hahne, were eventually expelled from the party on 27 April 2015. They both denied the accusations of relations with extremist groups, and claimed that SD's parliamentary group leader Mattias Karlsson wanted to get rid of them after Hahne defeated the leadership's preferred candidate for the chairmanship of SDU in Stockholm.