The tale concocted about Tommie Lindh’s death has become an excuse to target minorities, particularly Muslims, with violence. In early May 2020, a 19-year-old was murdered in a small, relatively obscure city in northern Sweden. But search for the young man’s name online – Tommie Lindh – and you’ll get hit after hit from far-right… Continue reading “The radical right is exploiting a Swedish teen’s murder”
Sweden’s leftist coalition has taken an authoritarian approach to the COVID-19 pandemic that is more suited to governments on the far right. Sweden has dealt with the global COVID-19 pandemic very differently from the other Nordic countries. All but Sweden are led by women. The female prime ministers in Denmark, Norway and Finland closed down… Continue reading “COVID-19 Casts a Shadow Over Swedish Exceptionalism”
For some decades now, it has been a tradition that Swedish parties have chosen a flower for their logo. In 2006, Sverigedemokraterna (SD, Sweden Democrats) changed their party symbol from a flaming torch in the form of a Swedish flag to a flower, Hepatica nobilis. The change marked a symbolic transformation from the parties Neo-Nazi… Continue reading “Review of Sverigedemokraterna och nazismen [”The Sweden Democrats and Nazism”] by Maria Robsahm (2020)”
What appeared as a harmless series of lectures for journalism students, soon turned out to be one of the first Swedish cases of the issue of ‘academic freedom’ as a battlefield of radical right mobilization. During fall of 2019, the Department of Media, Journalism and Communication at the University of Gothenburg arranged a lecture series… Continue reading “Sweden heading towards ‘academic freedom’ as battlefield of the radical right”
More than 25 years have passed since the tragedy, yet a web of conspiracy theories that has been spun around the disaster has fueled the Swedish radical right’s imagination. On the night of September 27-28, 1994, the ferry MS Estonia, carrying 989 passengers between Tallinn and Stockholm, sank in the Baltic Sea, hit by hard weather and… Continue reading “The Sinking of MS Estonia: The Swedish Radical Right’s Favorite Conspiracy”
Four facets of the Fascist label in the Swedish context The use of the term ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ in the context of the Swedish radical right and its parliamentary arm, the Sweden Democrats (SD), is extremely contested. Following the general elections of 2014, PM Stefan Löfven characterized the party in an op ed in Dagens… Continue reading “’Spöknippet’: the chilling continuities of fascist imagination in the Swedish Radical Right”
It can be difficult to separate the alleged watchdogs of freedom from the bloodhounds of the populist radical-right discourse. On June 6, 2017, Sweden’s national holiday, charges were filed with the Swedish international prosecution office against “a number of individuals in key positions inside Sweden’s government administration, media and in the country’s political establishment” engaged… Continue reading “How the Swedish Radical Right Hijacked Human Rights”
The alt-right mobilised online to back far-right parties at Sweden’s general election – but are their tactics no longer effective? Recent years have seen the far and extreme right wing building international coalitions to disseminate propaganda in an attempt to bring the public around to their talking points, including the development of large networks of… Continue reading “Meme warfare in the Swedish context”
The right-wing populist perpetuum mobile Like many others, appalled by what I find extremely dubious and divisive rhetoric in disarming the credibility of independent testimony from Holocaust survivors, I started a petition against Teodorescu’s editorials. Its main aim was to make the owners of GP (the media house Stampen AB, Stena Finans and other lesser… Continue reading “Holocaust survivors in Sweden– the ‘straw men’ for the radical right (Part 2)”
‘Our adversaries have forced us into an existential fight about the survival of our culture and our nation. There are only two choices: victory or death.’ –Mattias Karlsson of the radical right Swedish Democrats, Facebook comments on the outcome of the Swedish national elections 9 September 2018. Following Sweden’s national elections on 9 September, tensions… Continue reading “Holocaust survivors in Sweden– the ‘straw men’ for the radical right (Part 1)”