Peripheral Sweden

Sammanfattning: After the major populist events such as Trump and Brexit, the media politicians turned their attention to the socio-economic and political division between big cities and small countryside communities. Rural areas where right-wing populist parties have found a large part of their support have besome “left-behind places", described as forgotten and misunderstood. The question of why these populations give their support to far right movements is almost exclusively answered by political experts, journalists, or through hard figures. Despite the great academic attention on the subject, very few have given the population that they try to understand a chance to express their viewpoints. Based on previous research about right-wing populism and structural vulnerability, this study explores how the term “left behind” can be conceptualized and shed light on the success of right-wing populist parties in structurally vulnerable rural areas. I suggest that these places with advantage can be understood to be both politically and economically abandoned and that such a situation creates dissatisfaction in line with the theory of relative deprivation, making it a breeding ground for right-wing populist parties. In order to explore this, I conducted a most-likely case study on the rural municipality of Ljusnarsberg, including interviews with inhabitants in the constituency of Ställdalen. The analysis suggests that both economical and cultural abandonment play a role in the success of RWPP parties but that much of the dissatisfaction found among the inhabitants can be attributed to the socio-economic situation and not a profound value difference with the rest of society.