To Örebro University

Since the establishment of the Sweden Democrats they have collected more and more votes for every election. They have managed to go from being a marginalised right wing extremist party to an established party in parliament in less than twenty years. Their entry into the parliament in 2010 is the result of a journey that started in 1995 and intensified during the 2000s. This chapter takes a rhetorical perspective and specifically analyses the public debate regarding the Sweden Democrats and if they should be allowed to buy advertisement space. The background of the party is explained and set in a both Swedish and broader context. It is also reviewed how the established parties publicly declared their strategies towards the Sweden Democrats and how the general media treatment and view of the party was during primarily the 2000s.

With a combined method of rhetorical pro et contra theory and modern argumentation theory, Toulmin and informal logic, the continuous debate between 2002 and 2010 is analysed. It goes through how individual arguments are constructed, how they relate to each other over time, how the standpoint of the editors in chief shifts over time and how the argumentation is structured in the public debate.