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THE LOCAL LIST – ALMEDALEN

POLITICS

Five reasons why Sweden’s Almedalen is like Survivor

What's Sweden's Almedalen Week, you rightly ask? It's basically a sort of political version of TV show Survivor. Here are five reasons why...

Five reasons why Sweden's Almedalen is like Survivor
A Christian Democrat representative crowdsurfing at Almedalen in 2016. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

1. They're both staged on islands

Key to the Survivor concept is marooning an unlikely bunch of competitors on an isolated island, and Almedalen Week, held in early July, also hinges upon thrusting a group of rivals onto a tiny location. The event effectively crams Sweden's political and business elite together on a small corner of the island of Gotland, while journalists, members of the public, charities and pressure groups are also given access.

For eight days, a variety of different people from a variety of different backgrounds rub shoulders on the streets of the medieval walled city of Visby, and the small size of the place means it won't be particularly easy to escape anyone you don't see eye to eye with. But then, that's part of the point, as The Local's James Savage once explained here.


Prime Minister Stefan Löfven giving a speech at Almedalen 2016. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

2. They've both been going on for decades

Almedalen Week dates all the way back to 1968, when the Swedish prime minister at the time, Olof Palme, made a speech from the back of a truck at Visby. He was followed that same year by Krister Wickman, another political heavyweight of the era and a regular summer visitor to Gotland. From there, the event gradually grew, snowballing over the decades until it became the huge occasion it is today. 

Survivor doesn't quite stretch back as far as the 1960s, but its origins do date to almost two decades ago when Swedish reality show Expedition Robinson first aired in 1997. The format was subsequently exported to America, with the US version premiering in 2000. It still runs to this day, so there's clearly something about those islands… 


Olof Palme a few years later, speaking in Almedalen park in 1981. Photo: Andi Loor/SvD/TT

3. They're both huge media events

Incredibly for a programme that has been running since 2000, in the US, Survivor still consistantly ranks among the 30 most-watched shows in the country. The brief moment in the spotlight it provides is a golden opportunity for competitors to try to carve out a career as minor celebrities, lest they return to their day jobs when the series is over. 

Almedalen Week, likewise, is a huge media affair in Sweden, and with the eyes of the country fixed firmly on Gotland, there have been a few extreme examples of attempted attention-grabbing over the years. Like when Feminist Initiative party representative Gudrun Schyman burned 100,000 kronor on a barbecue in 2010 in protest over the gender pay gap. Or when former Green Party member Jenny Wenhammar launched a topless protest during the prime minister’s key speech in 2014. 


A big screen showing Left Party leader Jonas Sjöstedt during Almedalen Week. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

4. They're both about winning votes

Survivor is all about making sure you are voted the “sole survivor” and claim the show's grand prize, and attracting votes is also a big part of Almedalen Week. On Gotland, each political party uses their designated day to hold interviews, host seminars, and deliver key speeches, all of which can be useful in winning over voters. Unlike Survivor, there's no tangible cash prize on offer, but proving your worth as a political force can be important in the long run. 


Liberal Party leader Jan Björklund being interviewed during Almedalen Week. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/TT

5. They both stage challenges

Survivor uses gruelling physical challenges to pit entrants against each other for rewards, and while drinking rosé wine is about as physically challenging as it gets at Almedalen, the week does boast a notable trial.

Every year, a DJ battle is staged between the parties in government and the opposition, with the victors claiming both bragging rights and a shiny trophy. In 2016 the government came out on top thanks to their choice of Swedish pop staples from the likes of Håkan Hellström and Veronica Maggio. The opposition Alliance's trump card of Spice Girls favourite Wannabe apparently wasn't enough. Only in Sweden. 


Culture minister Alice Bah Kuhnke and EU minister Ann Linde at last year's DJ battle. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

Article first published in 2016 and updated in 2017.

POLITICS IN SWEDEN

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

With the think tank linked to the Sweden Democrats openly recruiting the next generation of far-right social media 'influencers', why is Sweden so complacent about moves to shift public opinion to the radical right, asks The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

The radical right in Sweden is at least open about what it’s trying to do.

The homepage of Oikos, the think tank set up by Mattias Karlsson, the former right-hand man of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, is currently recruiting the first 15 of “a new generation” of “conservative” online propagandists. 

The think tank – whose controlling foundation has been criticised for refusing to reveal the true origin of 5 million kronor in funding – this week launched its new Illustra Academy, which aims to train an army of young, far-right “creators” to help win over minds on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Successful applicants, it promises, will get the chance “to meet leading actors in social media and digital political influencing”.

They will get “mentorship from established political influencers”, build “valuable contacts with influencers, digital opinion-makers, creatives, politicians and possible future employers”, and meet “businesses, political organisations, communications agencies and media actors”. 

This programme is being set up by Andreas Palmlöv, one of the many top Sweden Democrats who went to the US after Donald Trump was elected president to work for an increasingly radicalised Republican Party, serving as an intern for the former Speaker of Congress Kevin McCarthy.

After his return to Sweden, Palmlöv was photographed meeting Gregg Keller, a US lobbyist he says he met through the Leadership Institute, an organisation backed by a who’s who of US billionaire donors which has over the past ten years spent 8 million kronor training up young “conservatives” in Europe.

Karlsson, Åkesson’s former right-hand man, has even closer links to the US, holding at least one meeting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and attending the wedding of the pro-Trump US conservative media profile Candace Owens in 2019.   

As a British citizen, I’m perhaps overly sensitive about the influence of conservative, libertarian donors and their think tanks, and of the efforts to use social media to push public opinion towards the radical right. 

Vote Leave, which led the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, started its life at 55 Tufton Street, the townhouse near the UK Parliament where the country’s most powerful “dark money” think tanks are based, while Matthew Elliot, its chief executive, was a Tufton Street veteran. 

Since the UK left the EU, the ruling Conservative Party has been increasingly captured by these think tanks and their wealthy backers.   

Ministers, former ministers and Conservative MPs now happily speak alongside radical right figures at lavish conferences like the National Conservatism UK conference part-funded by Christian pro-Trump US foundations, or the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference part-funded by Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the two billionaires who are the most open and prominent funders of attempts to shift the UK to the radical, libertarian right. 

Conservative MPs and former ministers have over the past two years been paid a total of £600,000 (8 million kronor) to appear on GB News, the Fox News clone jointly owned by Marshall and Chandler.

The Legatum Institute, Chandler’s own think tank, pretty much dictated the UK’s Brexit policy while Boris Johnson was prime minister, while during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, the Tufton Street think tanks supplied much of her team.

When her attempt to drive through their radical libertarian economic programme blew up spectacularly, she was forced to resign. But they haven’t given up, with Truss returning in February with the new Popular Conservatism group. 

I had always believed that the UK politics was immune to US levels of big donor influence, that the Conservative Party could never go the way of the Republican Party in the US, and it turns out I was wrong. 

So is that same naivety playing out in Sweden? 

The Oikos think tank has already started hosting international conservative conferences along the lines of ARC, with a conference at the Sundbyholms Slott castle outside Eskilstuna last year. 

When Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson raised questions earlier this year about the funding of Henrik Jönsson, a popular YouTube debater, she was sharply criticised by commentators of both left and right for seeking to smear a critic without providing evidence

But in the US, there are billionaire-funded ‘educational’ YouTube channels like PragerU that follow a very similar format to Jönsson’s. Jönsson’s videos reliably follow the same talking points, questioning whether global warming is really causing extreme weather, spread disinformation about wind farms, call for Sweden’s public broadcasters to be abolished, and claim migrants have trashed the economy. 

And when a donor last year asked Gunnar Strömmer, now Sweden’s Justice Minister, how to give 350,000 kronor to the Moderates without having to identify himself under party financing laws, in part of a sting by TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme, Strömmer advised him to give it directly to right-wing “opinion-makers”, meaning, presumably, people like Jönsson. 

Despite the uproar, Jönsson has never explicitly denied receiving funding from outside organisations, only that such funding does not influence his output. 

“I am quite open about the fact that I willingly take money from all decent organisations and private individuals,” he told the Dagens ETC newspaper, while declining to give any further details. “But no one controls what I say,” he added. 

He has admitted that the website for his Energiupproret campaign, which blamed green policy and the shutdown of nuclear power stations for high power prices in the run-up to the 2022 election, was built by Näringslivets Mediaservice, a right wing social media outfit the precise funding of which was always unclear, although it was linked to Stiftelsen Svenskt Näringsliv, a foundation set up partly by the Confederation of Swedish Industry. 

The founders of Oikos’ new influencer education programme would probably argue that nothing is stopping the political left and centre from raising funds to train up young social media influencers in exactly the same way. 

Left-wing parties are not above taking donations. Approached by the same donor as part of the Kalla Fakta undercover report, representatives of the centre-left Social Democrats – as well as the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats on the right – also recommended ways around party finance laws.

But do we really want the UK or Sweden to follow the path the US has taken in recent decades, where a handful of billionaires with radical right opinions have aggressively pumped money into think tanks and media outfits and so succeeded in pushing one of the main parties towards previously fringe political opinions? 

It didn’t need to be this way.

When Sweden was developing its new party financing laws back in 2016, experts warned the then government must not to allow the identity of donors to be hidden behind foundations, the key method used by so-called dark money in the US, but the loophole was left open by the law.

It’s not just Oikos, which is funded by an opaque foundation, Insamlingsstiftelsen för Svensk Konservatism (The Fundraising Foundation for Swedish Conservatism), which uses this loophole. 

When caught in the sting by the Kalla Fakta programme, a Social Democrat also suggested that the donor set up a foundation to hide their identity. 

It may be that money from US billionaires, big companies, or indeed from other states, is not yet being spent in Sweden in a way that can alter the political landscape, but because neither think tanks nor influencers need to give much information about who funds them, it’s impossible to know. 

In the UK, the danger may soon be averted. No one seems to take the new outfit fronted by Liz Truss too seriously, and the general election later this year should offer the chance to clean up the country’s politics.  

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve come very close to losing my original homeland to the kind of political developments seen in the US. I don’t want to lose my adopted country too.

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