The biggest challenge for Sweden’s new prime minister: to tackle rampant gang crime
During the long and complicated process of forming a government in Sweden’s divided parliament this autumn, Magdalena Andersson chose her words carefully when she addressed the country’s rampant gun violence. A carefully rehearsed phrase repeatedly tripped over her tongue: “We will turn every stone to break segregation – and the violence that has eaten into the body of our society.”
For Andersson – who became the country’s first female prime minister on November 30, after a false start the week before – The purpose is to send a message to the voters that she is determined to put an end to the gang violence that affects Sweden’s cities. But it is also to show that she accepts that shootings are linked to segregation between immigrant-dominated housing areas and the rest of the country.
Recognizing that connection – and implicitly the connection between the violence and decades of liberal Swedish immigration policy – was until recently taboo for Andersson’s Social Democrats. It is still a sensitive subject for a party that has long wanted Sweden to be seen as a “humanitarian superpower”. But the rise for the right-wing extremist Sweden Democrats, who have parked at 20 percent in opinion polls, combined with daily headlines about new acts of violence in suburbs with a high immigrant population, has forced the party to sharpen its stance.
Certain 47 people in Sweden lost their lives in shootings last year. This year, it looks unlikely to get better: no later than November 30, the death toll stood at 44. Shootings have become so common that they pass individually without more than a casual news report. But a gang murder on October 21 this year received more attention than usual because award-winning rap artist Nils Grönberg, known by his stage name Einar, was shot dead up close outside his apartment in the middle class Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm. .
At first, Grönberg was not typical of those associated with Stockholm’s gangland: he was born in Sweden to two Swedish parents and his mother is an actor at Dramaten in Stockholm. But the main facts about his background contradict a more troubled adolescence: after dropping out of school from a young age, he ended up in a bad audience. As a 16-year-old, he released a breakout rapeseed single, and he dedicated the accompanying video to a murdered gang leader from Enskededalen, the area in southern Stockholm where Grönberg grew up.
The murder of Einar came just a week before the appeal of several men who were convicted of involvement in kidnapping him in May last year.
Vårbynätverket, a gang that got its name from the disadvantaged immigrant-dominated residential area in Stockholm’s suburbs where it operates, kidnapped Grönberg in 2019, when he was 17. The abduction was orchestrated at a distance by 33-year-old Vårby residents and the gang leader, Chihab Lamouri, from his home in Spain .
Among those involved was rapper Haval Khalili, whose role was to lure Grönberg into a trap so that the other gang members could kidnap him. According to prosecutors, the motive was purely economic: gang members assaulted him, took his Rolex watch and gold chains. Grönberg himself refused to cooperate with the police who investigated his kidnapping and did not witness the trial against his abductors.
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Grönberg’s murder encapsulates many of the fears that the public has about gang gang murders. That he was white and ethnically Swedish made him atypical of both victims and perpetrators, but researchers believe that Sweden’s criminal gangs are organized on geographical rather than ethnic lines. They grow up in areas with desperate social problems that usually have large communities of immigrant origin, but white children living there have never been automatically spared from the clutches of gangs.
Sweden is the only country in Europe where fatal shootings have increased over the last 20 years, according to a study released earlier this year by the Crime Prevention Council (Brå). It is now among the worst-hit countries on the continent, with four fatal shootings per million inhabitants last year – almost three times the European average. 80 percent of gun crime is linked to organized crime, says Brå.
Getting the gang violence under control was already a hot political issue before Einar’s death. Voting agency Novus lists law and order as one of the voters’ biggest issues, and by a certain margin the biggest issue for center voters – and the issue is becoming increasingly important.
Four opposition parties, including the Sweden Democrats, issued a 20-point plan to address the issue, including stop-and-search zones, greater powers to spy on suspects’ communications and – in a move that may aim to highlight the link between crime and immigration – more expulsions of convicted criminals. Ten days later, the Social Democratic government published its own 34-point plan. Einar was killed the next day.
The high-profile nature of Einar’s murder – and the significant media attention that has followed his death – has increased the need for politicians to show that they are willing and able to deal with violence.
Andersson has just stepped into the role of Prime Minister, but her biggest challenge is already obvious. Without signs that the violence is diminishing and voters are becoming increasingly frustrated with the politicians’ failure to get the gangs under control, Andersson, who will meet the voters in a parliamentary election in September next year, will need to convince Swedes that she has a plan that will work.
[See also: Sweden named its first woman prime minister. Seven hours later she resigned.]