Levent Kenez/Stockholm
The leader of a Turkish-linked Islamist party in Sweden resigned on election night after his party lost nearly every city council seat it had won four years earlier, ending his campaign by accusing mosques of steering Muslim voters toward rival parties.
Mikail Yüksel, founder and chairman of the Partiet Nyans (Nuance Party), announced on the social platform X late on the night of September 13 that he was stepping down as leader, though he will stay in the post until the next party congress.
Returns from Sweden’s general election showed Nyans collapsing in the strongholds that fueled its 2022 breakthrough. In Landskrona, where the party won 2.4 percent of the vote in 2022, support fell to zero this year, according to Swedish Bulletin news outlet. In Botkyrka, where Nyans had held council seats, the party was tracking at 1.8 percent with about half the votes counted, a drop of 0.2 percentage points from the previous election, according to the Mitt i local newspaper. Its support in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby, where it attracted roughly 26 percent of the vote in 2022, had disappeared entirely.
Yüksel told Swedish news website 100.se that mosques had indirectly urged worshippers to vote instead for the Left Party and the Green Party, both of which gained ground in districts with large immigrant populations this year. He said the pattern had been building since 2022 and was concentrated among Arabic-speaking and Muslim voters, telling the outlet that those parties had unquestionably absorbed his former base. He also wrote on X that he should have left leadership after the 2022 election but had been misled by people no longer around him.
The party’s internal turmoil began almost immediately after its 2022 breakthrough. Disputes inside its city council delegations led to resignations and expulsions that cost Nyans seats and strained relations between the leadership and local branches. Turnout among the party’s core constituency, voters in immigrant-heavy suburbs known in Sweden as “forort,” has historically trailed the national average, and a further decline in those neighborhoods this year cut directly into the party’s share of votes. The Social Democrats and the Left Party expanded their outreach in areas with large immigrant populations after losing support there in 2022, sharpening their messaging on discrimination and social welfare and pulling voters back to the mainstream left, according to Swedish Dagens Blad news outlet. Nyans introduced only a handful of motions during its four years on the Botkyrka city council, a record that reinforced the party’s reputation for limited influence once in office. Yüksel’s decision to run as a candidate in 10 municipalities at once this year added to the sense of an organization built around a single figure rather than a broader structure
Yüksel’s exit closes a turbulent chapter for a politician whose career has been shadowed by ties to Turkish nationalist politics and to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party. He entered Swedish politics through the Center Party but was expelled from it in August 2018 following allegations that he had links to the Grey Wolves, a Turkish nationalist movement associated with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which is allied with Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Yüksel previously said he was instead pushed out for refusing to publicly criticize Turkey and Erdogan.
His father, Orhan Yüksel, has spent decades as an MHP politician in Turkey and once headed the party’s Grey Wolves youth wing. He served as mayor of Kulu, the family’s hometown in Konya province, from 1999 to 2004 and later ran unsuccessfully for the post twice more including on the MHP ticket in 2014. In the 2019 Swedish local elections, he publicly urged support for a joint AKP-MHP candidate in Turkey’s elections while also defending his son amid the controversy in Sweden.
Mikail Yüksel founded Partiet Nyans in 2019 to represent what he described as Sweden’s Muslim and immigrant communities, building his platform around discrimination, housing and parental rights within the country’s child welfare system. Swedish and international coverage has repeatedly described the party as advancing an Islamist and pro-Turkey agenda, and it belongs to the European political alliance called the Free Palestine Party. Yüksel has aligned several of his public positions with Ankara’s foreign policy, calling on Sweden in 2023 to yield to Turkish pressure over Quran burnings and declining to use the word genocide when asked about the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Yüksel also continued the Erdogan government’s rhetoric against Turkish citizens who fled to Sweden to escape persecution over their opposition to Erdogan.
The party’s losses came in a national election that produced a razor-thin split between Sweden’s left and right blocs. The Social Democrats, led by Magdalena Andersson, had a narrow lead in the vote count even as the party appeared headed for its weakest parliamentary result since 1928. The Left Party, led by Nooshi Dadgostar, posted its best modern-era result and grew more than any other party represented in the Riksdag. The Sweden Democrats appeared set to lose seats in a general election for the first time in the party’s history.
In his resignation post, Yüksel wrote, “Thanks for everything, I am resigning now as leader of Partiet Nyans.” On X he said he would use the transition period to look for new leadership, writing that he would stay until the next congress while working to bring in a new chairman and board. He said he intended to remain a party member and continue helping in other ways. Yüksel also addressed the national result directly, telling followers he believed a Social Democrat-led government was on track to take power and saying he was relieved that the governing coalition built around the Tidö agreement, the cooperation platform linking the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals with support from the Sweden Democrats, was losing its hold on power. At the same time he wrote that he was concerned about the future of rights for Muslims and other minorities in Sweden regardless of which bloc ultimately forms the next government. Speaking to 100.se on the morning after the vote, he said, “I can’t be party leader forever, someone else must take over.” He added that he had thought about leaving for a long time and had wanted to step down as far back as the 2022 election and argued that Nyans’s absence from parliament in the last term was not in itself the reason the Moderates were able to form a government after that vote.
