Sweden’s Riksdag fire | theTrumpet.com
It happened in Austria. It happened in Italy. Now it has happened in Sweden. A far-right party became part of the government. As the Trumpet previously covered, a party with far-right roots won the second largest number of seats in Sweden’s parliamentary elections on September 11. The Moderates’ new Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. took office on 18 October. Together with three other right-wing parties, the Sweden Democrats (SD) are the largest party in the coalition.
Approximately. The Sweden Democrats’ ties to neo-Nazism are too distasteful for the other three parties. So the other parties formed a minority government. SD must instead provide trust and support. It means promising to keep the government afloat without actually being a part of it. But the Sweden Democrats are clearly “the power behind the throne” in the ruling coalition. – If we are to support a government that we are not in, it will cost, said SD leader Jimmie Åkesson before the vote.
Cost it has. One agreement between the four parties outlines some of the new government’s policies. Much of it looks like the hard-line anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and tough-on-crime policies SD promised voters. Sweden have struggled with rising crime and rising Islamist terrorism in recent years. That’s what made so many people vote for them. Many Swedes see what mass immigration from the Muslim world is doing to their society and don’t like it.
Much of the “Tidö agreement” (named after Tidö castle, where it was negotiated) is in hard-to-understand legal language. But notice the following excerpt:
- A possibility of being able to deport gang criminals who lack Swedish citizenship without having been convicted of a crime must be investigated. …
- Law enforcement is primarily the responsibility of the state and not the municipalities. The state should therefore take greater responsibility for young people who commit serious crimes. The responsibility for the most seriously criminal young people must therefore be shifted from the municipalities to the Correctional Service. …
- The possibility of renting prison places in other countries must be investigated with the aim of reaching an agreement to rent prison places in comparable countries in Sweden’s immediate area in order to deal with the lack of places in Swedish penitentiary care. …
- During the coming mandate period, Sweden will receive 900 quota refugees per year. [The current quota is 5,000.]
- There is a big problem with extremism and Islamism among schools with a Muslim profile. The School Inspectorate must be tasked with increasing its supervision of schools with a confessional orientation or an orientation that can be assumed to be run with problems surrounding extremism and Islamism. As a rule, supervision must take place through unannounced visits….
In other words, if SD does not join the government, the cost for Kristersson is to implement SD’s program for them. SD gets what they want for the country without even participating in the government. Its position makes it the puppet master of the minority coalition. As the New York Times wrote: “The three losing parties – the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals – will govern on behalf of a winning party.”
Much of what SD calls for is not particularly extreme. It sees the cause of Sweden’s terrorist attacks as a failed multicultural experiment. Its solution is an immigration overhaul. Many of its changes could help Sweden’s problems with crime and radicalization. But a closer look at SD’s history gives a little more cause for concern.
The Sweden Democrats were formed in 1988. One of the party’s founders, Gustaf Ekström, was a corporal in Adolf Hitler’s Waffen-SS during World War II ii. Another early leader of the party, Anders Klarström, formerly belonged to the openly neo-Nazi Nordic Realm Party (where party members wore brown shirts, performed Nazi salutes and had security handled by skinheads). The party has worked hard to distance itself from this legacy and present itself as a respectable alternative to mainstream conservatism. But stories of SD figures making racist and anti-Semitic comments on social media are still emerging. In 2018, a low-level SD politician got into trouble for having stated on social media that “Hitler was not wrong about the Jews.” Even the current leader Åkesson joined the party while it was quiet led by the neo-Nazi Klarström.
Islamic extremism is of course an important threat to counter. And no one imagines at the moment that the current government is setting up concentration camps and book burning. But it is still remarkable to see how a party with clear right-wing roots could become so normalized. Even in the famously progressive Sweden.
Part of the reason why the Swedish left often denigrates someone right of center as “fascist”. A common insult for Swedish leftists to throw at conservatives is “blue-brown”. (Blue refers to the traditional color of conservatism and brown to Nazi brown shirts.) This included former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. Foreign policy went so far as to claim that “The left’s negative campaign helped the right win in Sweden.”
Calling one’s opponents “fascists” is a common topic of discussion among the left i very of different countries. “You call [all conservatism] fascist … and everything is fascist,” said theTrumpet.com Assistant Editor Richard Palmer on Sept. 1 Trumpet Daily episode. “People have done a good job of watering down the language so that it’s hard to find something that’s really accurate to talk about these people as.” Mr. Palmer was referring to how the liberal use of the word “fascist” helped legitimate fascism, such as the fascist rise in Italy, to appear more benign. In a related articlePalmer said leftists are “helping to cover up the rise of real fascism with their false accusations.”
Voters get so sick of hearing the word “fascist” so liberally thrown around that, come election time, real fascists have an easier time coming across as palatable. Instead of wearing a brown shirt, they wear a suit and tie. Instead of tattooed thugs, they are young, urban professionals. Instead of attacking Jews, they attack terrorism. In short, they appear normal. And once they are voted in, stay for a few years, and do not start arresting journalists or passing racial laws, they seem even more normal.
Here is the dark truth about the Swedish election: Fascism in Europe is becoming mainstream. Not only is it being normalized, but the mainstream conservatives are willing to work with it – even if only from afar – to form government. The stigma of associating with a neo-Nazi rooted party is fast disappearing. And you can be sure that other parties in Europe with far-right connections are watching what is happening in Stockholm and salivating.
All this then raises questions: What happens when far-right parties become more established? What happens when they become the new normal? What happens when they become so entrenched in the political system that they can begin to move forward with some of their more radical programs?
Some of the government’s programs are intrusive. Deporting people for group affiliation instead of crime is not common in Western democracies. Nor does the government allow arbitrary and unannounced raids on schools. When the targets are terrorists and mafia groups, no one complains. But what happens when less threatening outsiders become targets?
The answer to these questions is obvious: nothing good.
To learn more, read “Real fascism is rising.” Also read our Editor-in-Chief Gerald Flurry’s article on the same topic, “Fascism is resurgent in Italyfrom our November-December 2022 print issue.