A letter from Sweden: The extreme right is changing public norms — it can happen here too
In Sweden, where I live, we have just experienced a national election that represents the culmination of years of intensified polarization. Anyone who lives in the US will recognize the pattern, although it is particularly shocking for a country as culturally committed to consensus as Sweden. As an American ready to vote in the US midterm elections, the connections are foremost in my mind. As a descendant of Nazis who has spent many years immersed in historyI feel intensely what is at stake for democracy and peace globally.
Ahead of the 2018 Swedish election cycle, my friend, Hédi Fried, invited the leader of Sweden’s Moderate Party to lunch in her apartment. Hédi is a national icon in Sweden — a Holocaust survivor, psychologist and author who has been a warrior for democracy and human rights for more than 40 years.
The leader of the Moderates, Ulf Kristersson, was one of several party leaders who were invited to meetings at Hédi’s home, to talk about their experiences and expertise. On the table was a smörgåstorta, or smörgåstorta, her favorite Swedish pastry. Hédi came to Sweden in 1945 on a Red Cross boat with his younger sister. They were emaciated and sick, having survived several concentration camps; their parents, murdered.
During his meeting with Hédi, Kristersson promised never to enter into any form of cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, a political party that has made significant progress in the Riksdag. The reason: The Sweden Democrats do not represent an ordinary party. After World War II, the party emerged from a neo-Nazi group called Behåll Sverige Svensk (BSS), or Håll Sverige Swedish. Its founders had Nazi connections and were even members of Hitler’s Waffen SS. Over the years, the Sweden Democrats have tried to clean up their party, but its behavior, even in recent yearssuggesting that it cannot escape its compromised beginnings.
After all, when the votes were counted in Sweden’s last national election in September 2022, it became increasingly clear that the Moderates could only govern if they entered into a coalition with the Sweden Democrats, who for the first time overtook the Moderates to become Sweden’s second largest party. (Sweden’s Social Democrats, the party largely responsible for transforming Sweden from one of Europe’s poorest nations to one of its richest and most progressive, is still the largest political party, but did not have a large enough majority to govern.) Needless to say say: Kristersson caved and made what many consider to be an alliance with the devil.
For someone like me, who has spent decades trying to understand how her grandparents, among millions of other Germans, could have become part of a political force that eventually ushered fascists into the “sweet room” of German politics, it sounds unnerving. known. For my friend Hédi, a Holocaust survivor, it is not just a broken promise, but one of many symptoms of Europe’s collective obliviousness to the dangers of letting the extreme right into positions of power.
History tells us that it was the same slippage in German politics in the early 1930s that brought the Nazis to power. Hitler got the reins based on the conservative elite’s misconception that they could control and eventually replace him.
While the Sweden Democrats have so far not received any ministerial positions in the new government, their leader Jimmie Åkesson was determined early in the negotiations that there would be a price for this arrangement. So far, the Sweden Democrats have, among other muscular roles, been given the chairmanship of the Riksdag’s foreign affairs committee (ahead of a year when Sweden will take over the chairmanship of the European Council).
Some might say that Hédi and I are just overreacting, that we are so obsessed with history that we cannot see clearly in this new era with its new actors. They may say, like even some minorities in Sweden (including some Jews) who find common ground with the Sweden Democrats’ anti-Muslim stance, that we ignore the reality of violent crime in immigrant-dense areas of Sweden, and the rise of perceived problems like anti-Semitism. Worst of all, they might say that we are denying the very thing that we have both worked to strengthen through our activism: democracy itself, where the results of free and fair elections must be respected.
Despite its nationalist anti-globalist bluster, the Sweden Democrats have for decades been connected to the rise of the extreme right globally, which has contributed to the overall erosion of democracy. Historian Tim Snyder recently summed up the existential gravity of this phenomenon for humans when he argued that “the future is democracy or not at all.” Together with Western Europe’s far-right and extremist parties, the Sweden Democrats have long sought legitimacy via Europe-wide networks and alliances, most recently through e.g. European Conservative and Reform Group (ECR) in the European Parliament. While there are shades of difference between Europe’s far-right parties, they are all challenged by a problem inherent in their political brand: A platform based on finding scapegoats for a nation’s problems does not lead to good governance, including respect for human rights, and it encourages the expression of discontent through violence.
In Sweden, this penchant for violence was chillingly illustrated on a summer evening in Stockholm in 2014, when members of the Sweden Democrats’ leadership, armed with lead pipes, shouted sexist and racist statements and physically assaulted, among others, an Iranian comedian. -Kurdish origin which had previously been heckled by the party. All three members of the Sweden Democrats lied to the media when asked about the incident and subsequently only one of them left the party. No disciplinary action was taken against the other two, and despite ample evidence from a video and confirmation by Swedish human rights watchdog EXPO, Åkesson claimed that the events had gone wrong. Most worryingly, the incident had no impact on the growing support for the Sweden Democrats, illustrating how the far right is changing public norms about what is acceptable behaviour.
It is hard not to see the analogy with the threatening and violent environment that Trumpism has encouraged, including the events that took place in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
As a new war rages on the European continent, the threat that the rise of political forces like the Sweden Democrats poses to all of us, wherever we are, relates to the way the global far-right ecosystem has been fueled by coordinated disinformation and supported by Moscow. Arguably, Putin’s war in Ukraine, which looms over the world with its threat of nuclear escalation, is less likely to have occurred if Putin had not been emboldened by his perception of political and social chaos and division in the West – which Russian trolls has facilitated for years through its support for far-right messaging.
In the Sweden Democrats’ public frenzy over the election of Donald Trump — a president who once invited Russia to help him undermine his political opponent, and who later claimed he trusted Putin’s word over his own intelligence services — and their curiously fervent support for his ill-informed apocalyptic depiction of Swedena liberal democracy a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, they played into Putin’s hands.
In today’s world, more than ever, what happens in Sweden matters in America and vice versa. Moderate leader Kristersson never returned to Hédi’s follow-up call after that meeting.
So I call America. How will we respond?