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POLITICS

Neo-Nazi disturbances at Almedalen could ‘change the nature’ of Swedish political staple

Disturbances and alleged violence carried out by the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR) at this year's Almedalen political festival are part of the neo-Nazi group's attempts to be more visible in the build-up to the Swedish election, The Local has been told.

Neo-Nazi disturbances at Almedalen could 'change the nature' of Swedish political staple
Members of neo-Nazi group NMR speaking at Visby during Almedalen week. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

NMR heckled a speech by Centre Party leader Annie Lööf and allegedly assaulted a woman at this year's event in Gotland, with one man arrested and investigated on suspicion of assault linked to hate crime.

Jonathan Leman, a researcher at anti-racism foundation Expo, explained to The Local that it is all part of a strategy from the neo-Nazi group ahead of the autumn Swedish general election.

“There has been an increase in their activity in recent years – more people, new recruits – and, it's election year. During election year they try to be more visible, hand out leaflets in public, things like that. And they are participating in this year's elections. So now more than before there's more public engagement by them. We've seen that during the whole year and we see that in Almedalen as well.”

NMR has doubled its numbers at Almedalen this year compared to 2017, when it caused controversy by attending the politics festival for the first time.

“Last year there were about 50 of them and they kept mostly to their tent and its vicinity – which was enough to cause a stir, scare people and create a lot of tension. However this year they are sending groups out on 'missions' as they call it, of about 8-10 people. They show violent and erratic behaviour, and are seeking conflict,” Leman said.

“We've seen some violent events already against men and women at Almedalen. Now there are around 100 of them there, so double the amount of activists, and they're also actively engaging with people all over Visby, which is different from before. They have a system where they are rewarding people for this kind of behaviour,” he added.

READ ALSO: 2017 set new record for neo-Nazi activity in Sweden

The organizers of Almedalen explained to The Local that they denied NMR an official presence at the week, but beyond that there is not much they can do due to the right to protest enshrined in Swedish law.

“Region Gotland said no to renting out space to that organization. It was appealed but Region Gotland won. Prior to that our main organizers said no to allowing antidemocratic and violent organizations to publicize their events in our official program,” Almedalen Week project leader Mia Stuhre noted.

“The police granted the permit they have now, without the involvement of Region Gotland, our politicians, or Almedalen Week. In the fundamental laws of Sweden we have the valuable right to express ourselves and demonstrate. The police granted a permit based on that.”

Stuhre would not comment on reported instances of violence, saying they are in the hands of the police, but said that “what we can work on is continuing to raise the question of what is acceptable at a democratic meeting place. Thinking differently and having differences in opinion are part of democracy”.

READ ALSO: Breaking down Sweden's anti-Semitism problem

There are concerns that if things are allowed to go on as they have this year the staple of the Swedish political calendar could be fundamentally changed, Expo's Leman warned.

“Some people think that if this is how it's going to be, then the event will need guards – that has been said and I think it's understandable. Essentially, that if it's like this we'll need guards at every event,” he said, noting that Expo has observed violence at many of the NMR events prior to Almedalen.

“But if we have guards at every event, it's not Almedalen anymore. It changes the nature of it. So there is now an expectation that the authorities should do more, and that if it's allowed to continue this way then it will threaten the future of Almedalen,” he concluded.

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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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