As leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Akesson has steered his party from ‘outcast’ to heavyweight whose support is essential if the right-wing bloc is to govern after Sunday’s election.

The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats rose to become the country’s second-biggest party in the parliamentary vote, winning 20.7 percent from 94 percent of constituencies.

With his immaculately coiffed brown hair, glasses and neatly trimmed beard, the casually dressed 43-year-old looks like your average Swede.

That comes naturally for someone whose 17 years as party leader transformed an often violent neo-Nazi movement called Keep Sweden Swedish into a nationalist party with a flower as its logo.

“He wants to give the impression that he’s an ordinary guy … who grills sausages, talks normally and takes charter trips to the Canary Islands,” Jonas Hinnfors, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg, told AFP.

“He goes out of his way not to come across as intellectual or educated,” he added.

Akesson grew up in a middle-class family with an entrepreneurial father and a mother who worked as a nursing assistant in Solvesborg, a town of 9,000 people in southern Sweden.

There, in the small towns and homesteads of rural Scania, SD established its stronghold, amid concerns about the heavily immigrant-populated city of Malmö nearby.

Akesson joined the Sweden Democrats in the 1990s after a disappointing teenage stint in the main right-wing party, the conservative moderates.

After leaving Lund University without a degree, he took over leadership of the SD party in 2005, when voter support was steady at around 1%.

The party underwent a major makeover, replacing its blue and yellow torch logo with an anemone, and vowing to shed its racist and violent roots.

She later announced a “zero tolerance” policy on racism in 2012, although critics regularly denounced the attempts as superficial.

In August, an investigative report by Swedish research group Acta Publica found that 289 politicians from parties represented in parliament were involved in either racist or Nazi activities, a large majority of them – 214 – from the Sweden Democrats.

Controversy regularly flares up about the party’s wandering members, but it has steadily risen in the polls.

It won 5.7 percent of the vote when it entered parliament in 2010, 12.9 percent in 2014 when it became Sweden’s third largest party in parliament, and 17.5 percent in 2018.

Its rise coincided with Sweden’s heavy immigration. The country with 10.3 million inhabitants has taken in around half a million asylum seekers in the last ten years.

The party has stolen voters from both the conservative moderates and the social democrats, particularly among working-class men.

Additionally, the fight against crime, long a top priority for the party, was a top priority for voters in Sunday’s election for the first time amid a soaring rise in gang shootings.

“I think (our success) can be explained by the fact that people think that the other parties don’t take their problems seriously,” Akesson told AFP at an election rally in Stockholm in August.

Akesson, who once said Muslims are “the greatest foreign threat since World War II,” has diluted the party’s rhetoric and policies like other nationalist parties in Europe over the years, according to analysts.

Once voted for a “Swexit”, the party scrapped the idea of ??leaving the European Union in 2019 due to a lack of public support.

And while other far-right parties in Europe have voiced their support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the SD has backed Ukraine at war and voiced support for Sweden’s NATO membership bid, a proposition it held until the invasion Moscow’s to Ukraine had refused.

According to Hinnfors, the Sweden Democrats have gone from a party “that says no to everything to a party that takes the parliamentary situation into account and starts to see where they can have the most influence, possibly cooperate and where they can compromise as little as possible”.

Akesson’s meteoric career success, however, took its toll.

In 2014 he admitted to an online gambling addiction and then took a six-month sabbatical from politics after a burnout.

Akesson is a crime fiction fan and loves pizza and fries. He is divorced and has an eight-year-old son.