Sweden’s Islamist party leader claims that Muslims profiled by intelligence, rights violated
Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
The leader of Sweden’s Islamist Nyansparti (Partiet Nyans, or PNy) claimed that Muslims in the Nordics’ most populous country are under pressure from intelligence services and that the authorities want to deprive Muslims of their rights and freedoms, in practice pursuing similar talking points made by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about Muslims in Europe.
Mikail Yüksel, a Swedish politician of Turkish origin accused of acting on behalf of the Erdoğan regime, said schools established by Muslims were closed after they were profiled by Swedish intelligence services. He also said that Sweden is not a country that values rights, freedoms or liberties.
“Today, unfortunately, the government in Sweden wants to take away the freedoms and rights of Muslims. For example, the headscarf ban, the circumcision issue. Muslim-owned schools are closed because of the activities of the intelligence services,” Yüksel said in a TV program moderated by Mücahit Küçükyılmaz, a chief adviser to the Turkish president.
“Sweden may appear to be a pro-freedom country from the outside, but I think it would be good to be aware of the oppression of immigrants, especially Muslims,” Yüksel added.
When asked by Erdoğan’s advisers where Turks in Sweden stand on Turkey blocking NATO membership approval for the Nordic country, Yüksel claimed that 90 to 95 percent of Turks side with Erdoğan’s government in line.
Yüksel also lamented that Sweden wants to cut off funding to mosques from foreign countries, especially Turkey, which supports a number of mosques run by Turkey’s religious authority, the Diyanet, in several Swedish cities. Diyanet-run mosques and Turkey-funded imams were previously revealed to have engaged in espionage on Swedish territory on behalf of the Turkish government. Reports that profiled critics of the Erdoğan regime were sent back to Turkey by Diyanet imams.
Yüksel accused Sweden’s justice minister of leading a campaign to ban such funding even at the EU level and said Sweden wants to pass a law to make such foreign funding illegal.
The program aired on 8 September 2022 on TRT Türk, a station owned by the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) that targets overseas audiences with a particular focus on the Turkish and Muslim diaspora communities.
Küçükyılmaz, also an Islamist, is known to run covert influence operations on behalf of his boss, Erdoğan, using social media troll armies, helping spread fake news and attacking opponents of the government with slander, distortions and lies. For a while he was the director of the presidential communications office and worked with the Turkish intelligence service SETA foundation in Ankara.
Yüksel’s comments about Küçükyılmaz’s program echo similar comments by Turkish President Erdoğan, who often accuses European governments of usurping the rights and freedoms of Turks and Muslims, looting their mosques and attacking veiled Muslim women in the street while authorities look the other way.
On 6 October 2020, Erdoğan publicly accused Sweden, among other European countries, of encouraging attacks on mosques, Muslims and Turks, saying the perpetrators are protected by the authorities. He noted that the rights of Muslims have been usurped and that attacks against Muslims have become a daily occurrence. Citing a Koran-burning incident in Sweden as an example, Erdoğan said the perpetrators are being protected in the name of freedom while the sacred values of Muslims are under attack.
“I say this very clearly: Racism and Islamophobia are protected by government authorities in many Western nations. …The killers who attacked our mosques and businesses of Muslims are not even prosecuted,” Erdoğan said.
On 26 October 2020, Erdoğan said his government was preparing security plans to protect Turks and Muslims in Europe against what he called dark and insidious plans and an all-out attack on Islam. He said Turkey has 6 million citizens living in European countries and would consider attacks against Turks and/or Muslims a national security issue.
“I want to state a fact very clearly here. As the president of a country that has 6 million of its citizens living in Europe, I find it useful to warn our interlocutors of the following. The end of this road you have embarked on to mask your failures are a disaster. Turkey is determined to protect the rights and security of its citizens. We regard hostility to Islam and racist terrorism as a matter of national security, and we will make our plans accordingly,” Erdoğan said.
Yüksel established Nyans with the support of Turks and Muslims in Sweden after he was expelled from the liberal Center Party (Center Party) in 2018 due to his alleged ties to the violent nationalist group Grå Vargarna, the youth wing of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
Yüksel’s father Orhan has long served as a politician with the MHP, which is allied with Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). He served as mayor of Kulu from 1999 to 2004. Orhan ran for mayor again in 2009 but lost by a few votes. He ran unsuccessfully again in the 2014 election on the MHP ticket. He was the head of MHP’s far-right youth movement Grå vargarna before.
In the 2019 local elections, he made a statement asking for support for a joint candidate from AKP and MHP. In the same statement, he also defended his son, who was facing problems in Swedish politics.
After his dismissal from the Center Party, Mikail spoke to Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu and claimed that he was asked to speak out against Turkey and President Erdoğan and that when he refused, he faced problems within his own party that led to his dismissal.
No direct evidence has emerged so far linking Nyan to Erdoğan’s government in Turkey, but if that connection is revealed in the future, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising. In June 2017, in an interview with Albanian TV, President Erdoğan himself openly admitted that there is nothing wrong with supporting political parties that share an ideology similar to that of his Islamist AKP in the Balkans and in other European countries. “Nobody should be bothered by this,” he added.
In February 2022, Erdoğan hosted a large delegation from the Union of International Democrats (UID), his ruling party’s long arm in Europe, at the presidential palace in Ankara, asking participants living in Europe to organize and create mechanisms to influence politics in countries where They live.
“[Turkey] has been a European country since the first century of the Ottoman Empire. Until the beginning of the last century, the land on which many European countries are located today was part of our homeland. Today, beyond our historical and social ties, we form an inseparable part of the European continent with our Thrace region,” Erdoğan told the crowd, which chanted slogans during his speech. UID has been very active in many Western European countries, including Sweden.
During the 2022 election campaign, Yüksel was given a platform by Turkey’s state news agency Anadolu to highlight his talking points, which helped to promote him, especially in Turkish circles in Sweden as well as in diaspora communities in Turkey, where Turks with Swedish citizenship cast their votes.
In Sweden’s parliamentary elections, the party Nyans received 28,352 votes, corresponding to 0.44 percent of the electorate, making it the largest party in Sweden that is not represented in the Riksdag.
It was not a major impact, but according to Yüksel, this deprived the ruling center-left bloc, led by the Social Democrats (Social Democrats), of a slim lead in parliament and brought a center-right coalition to power.
“We went down in history as the party that overthrew the Social Democratic government,” Yüksel said, commenting on the election results. “The Muslim voters punished the Social Democrats,” he added.
Yüksel’s claim may be an exaggeration given that major parties lost some votes to smaller parties on both sides of the political spectrum, making them roughly equal in their losses. Yüksel’s claim is based solely on nominal numbers and a one-sided picture of voter bleeding from only the center-left bloc, which is quite misleading.
It is true that Nyans is believed to have received votes primarily from supporters of the Social Democrats and the Vänsterpartiet (Left Party). The Social Democrat-led bloc lost the election by only about 26,000 votes and Nyans received over 28,000 votes. But similar changes were registered in the center and far-right base, with smaller parties chipping away at votes from major parties in the bloc.
But in regional and municipal elections, Nyans has shown some success. In the Stockholm region, it received 0.70 percent of the votes cast. In the region of Skåne, it received 1 percent of all votes. Its performance was more notable in the municipal elections. In Botkyrka municipality in the southern Stockholm region, the party managed to get 2.03 percent or 916 votes, above the 2 percent limit, and secured two mandates out of 75 in the municipal council.
Yüksel moved his residential address to Botkyrka a day before the election to take a seat in the municipality, which was questioned by other politicians in the city and criticized for manipulating the system. Although the party managed to win two mandates, the municipality will continue to be run by the center bloc, which declared that it would not work with Nyans.
It currently appears that Nyans will continue its operations from its new base in Botkyrka, near Stockholm, where many Turks and Muslims live.
In Stockholm’s municipal elections, Nyans got 0.93 percent, or 5,694 votes, without getting a seat in the municipal council. But figures from the municipality show that the party performed well in some constituencies in the city. In Stockholm’s Rinkby district, the party received nearly 30 percent of the vote and is ranked as the largest party there. In its strongest stronghold, Malmö, the party received 2.10 percent in the municipal election, but missed the threshold for a place in the municipal council, which is 3 percent.
In the election campaign, Nyans was criticized by other parties for increasing polarization among the voters by arousing people’s fear. exploit feelings of alienation and make Swedish authorities suspicious in order to win votes. Some of its candidates in Scania spread hate propaganda against Jews and sell conspiracy theories about the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.
Yüksel denies that Nyans is an Islamist party and claims to believe in a multicultural society. According to Yüksel, Islamophobia, integration and housing problems are the core issues they attach the most importance to. Yüksel also advocates official minority status for Muslims, in the same way as Jews. The Nuance Party has recently performed at support meetings for families whose children have been placed in the care of the Social Services. According to Nyans, Muslims are discriminated against when children are taken from their parents due to abuse. Furthermore, children placed with foster families lose their Muslim identity.
Almost all the candidates on the Nyans list were Muslims. There are very few Swedes on the list, which includes Muslims of Turkish, Somali and Balkan origin. According to a report in the Swedish media, there were a significant number of criminals and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated people among Nyan’s candidates.
For example, Bashir Aman Ali, the founder of the Al-Azhar Foundation who ran for a parliamentary seat in the city of Stockholm, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2019 for allowing 10 million kroner (about $900,000). ) to be taken out of the foundation illegally to start an Islamic bank. Ali claimed during the election campaign that Muslims in Sweden can be “imprisoned without trial or evidence”.
According to a news story published on the state-funded Sveriges Radio website on 1 September 2022, Yüksel was convicted in a Turkish court of a minor assault of a relative in 2009 and ordered to pay damages.
After the election, an internal feud broke out within Nyans over Yüksel’s leadership and some party members, feeling alienated, called for his resignation.