Liberal Sweden Loses its Innocence

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

European countries are currently undergoing a series of political and social upheavals, and liberal Sweden is no exception. Anti-immigrant feeling, once almost unthinkable, has become common.

Sweden has accepted a very large number of immigrants, especially from the Middle East and Africa. In 2015, the country admitted received 163,000 migrants -- about 1.6 per cent of Sweden’s population of 10 million.

They overwhelmed the capacity of both government and civil society organizations. And they were disproportionately responsible for violent crimes.

Swedish police don’t register criminal suspects according to ethnicity, but prosecutors say many men facing trial have non-Swedish backgrounds, and that has been used as ammunition by anti-immigration groups.

A report released this year showed that Sweden in the last two decades has gone from having one of the lowest rates of gun violence in Europe to one of the highest.

Gangs of men torched cars with assembly-line precision in Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, last August, in what Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, a Social Democrat, described as “extremely organized” attacks. Within hours, more than 80 vehicles were in flames. In late September, 20 people were hurt in a suspicious explosion and fire at an apartment building there.

Sweden’s Jewish community has faced increased antisemitic violence, particularly in Malmo, the country’s third largest city, where immigrants constitute one-third of the population, and many have left as a result.

“Many students who have a background in the Middle East, and in several Muslim countries, have notions of Jews that are not at all compatible with democratic values,” Anders Rubin, a school council member from 2013 to 2018, told the newspaper Sydsvenskan last year. He also confessed that the municipality had not taken the complaints of its Jewish citizens seriously.

Malmo is virtually a segregated city. When the international media write about Rosengard, a poor immigrant area, the topic of choice is most often crime, criminals or challenges in education, employment and housing. Bombs and shootings have become commonplace, and cars are regularly set on fire.

Because of all this, the Sweden Democrats (SDs), a right-wing populist party once politically toxic, is now the third largest party in the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament. It has effectively fashioned a narrative linking the surge of predominantly Muslim immigrants to an uptick in violent crimes and perceived strains on the Swedish welfare system.

Last May the leader of the party, Jimmie Akesson, called for a crackdown on what he described as “imported values” that sanction violence against women.

Sweden’s Gender Equality Minister Marta Stenevi admitted that Sweden does have a problem with so-called “honour crimes,” which are committed to defend the supposed reputation of a family or extended community.

But she believes labelling violence towards women as an “immigrant issue” is uncalled for. Of course, this didn’t go over well with those stoking anti-immigrant feelings.

Akesson is trying to convince the center-right Moderate Party, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party that they will need his support to take power in next September’s election.

But it’s not just those on the right upset by what has changed in Sweden. It also has affected the liberal social classes.

As Malcolm Kyeyune, a freelance writer living in Uppsala, writes, in “Sweden’s Cultural Revolution,” at first after 2015 there was anger directed at the Swedes “who took a different position on refugees. They were too racist, too set in their ways, or too self-interested to heed the humanitarian clarion call.”

But now things are different. There is the realisation that nobody, including middle-class progressives, wants to live with the consequences of crime, social tensions, and violence committed by gangs.

Families now go to great lengths to avoid their own children mixing with immigrants in school. They worry about the academic implications -- not to mention the risk of violence and disorder -- of letting the immigrants into “their” schools. In Trollhattan, a decision taken to bus children from migrant areas to other schools met with fierce protests, including liberal politicians, in late 2020.

“An uneasy ceasefire prevails in Swedish society now,” concludes Kyeyune. “SD voters are no longer at risk of having their careers cancelled. In 2021, an unspoken attitude of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ prevails.”