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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Get organised or Sweden’s open society will be a distant memory

Sweden turned hostile to immigrants and asylum seekers several years ago, but continued to pretend that it was a welcoming nation. Now official politics has caught up with reality, argues David Crouch

OPINION: Get organised or Sweden's open society will be a distant memory
Refugees arriving in Sweden in 2015 queue for buses at Hyllie station: Johan Nilsson / TT

The agreement announced on Friday by the four parties which won Sweden’s election feels like the moment in an episode of Road Runner, where the coyote character spots there is only air beneath him.

For those unfamiliar with the classic Looney Tunes cartoon, there were often scenes in which a character called Wile E. Coyote would run off a cliff, keep running in thin air, look down, realise there was no ground beneath him, and only then fall.

Sweden turned hostile to immigrants and asylum seekers years ago, but continued to pretend that it was a liberal and welcoming nation. Now, with the suddenness of that Road Runner moment, official politics has abruptly caught up with reality. 

Late last year, outgoing Social Democrat justice and migration minister Morgan Johansson was asked in parliament if Sweden had succeeded in reducing asylum rights to the EU minimum. His answer was full of soothing words about protecting people in a troubled world, about humanitarian needs, about a sustainable and humane system. But yes, he said, Sweden’s asylum framework was now the EU minimum and the numbers were the lowest for 20 years. 

With the Tidö Agreement, those soothing words are gone, and there is no longer any pretence that Sweden will continue to take into account individual freedoms, equality or human rights for non-Swedes. The agreement is a relentless, detailed, cold-blooded statement on how this government will cut the rights of all non-Swedish citizens to the bare minimum required by EU law.  Wherever possible, it adds, migrants will be encouraged to return to wherever they came from.  

The new approach will affect every aspect of life for non-Swedes, starting with access to healthcare, housing, child support, schools, and other benefits. It is all designed to minimise the “incentives” for people to come to Sweden. The Local has parsed the document here.

In some sense this is refreshingly honest: there is no longer any need to see through fancy political rhetoric to get to the meat of what is going on.

But it is still a shock to read, for example, that Sweden will change its constitution with the aim of “limiting the rights of asylum seekers as far as is legally possible” (page 34), or that “criminals” who lack Swedish citizenship will be deported “without having been convicted of a crime” (page 19).

In many areas, the groundwork for the shift had already been laid by the outgoing government. As The Local has reported in depressing detail over recent years, life has become harder both for people coming here to work or seek asylum, and for those with non-European backgrounds who already live here.

Attitudes in Swedish society have changed more broadly. A defining feature of this year’s election campaign was that immigrants were for the first time described as a problem in themselves, with politicians of both left and right drawing a connection between immigration and crime.

The media have both reflected and reinforced this shift. As he describes in a new book, the journalist Christian Catomeris left SVT’s flagship Agenda programme because of its negative approach to immigration.

“When [leading Sweden Democrat] Björn Söder now says that public service broadcasting must change, I laugh a little, because I feel that change has already taken place, that the SD’s questions and perspectives have permeated journalism since 2015 and probably also this election,” Catomeris told the journalists’ trade union last month.

The Tidö Agreement refers over and over again to utlänningar, “foreigners”, an unpleasantly pejorative word for non-Swedes. But outgoing prime minister Magdalena Andersson had already started to use the word earlier this year in a rhetorical shift that mirrored the language used by the Sweden Democrats and prepared the ground for her later remarks about “Somalitowns” and talk of forcibly removing immigrants from problem areas.

As an immigrant myself, married to a family of immigrants, who found Sweden’s generous response to the refugee crisis of 2015 inspiring, I am saddened and dismayed by the Tidö agreement. Even if it is only continuing trends already apparent in Swedish society and politics, it both strengthens and accelerates them.

But there is also room to push back. The agreement calls for a large number of inquiries to be set up to investigate how to do all the things the new government wants to do. The word inquiry (utredning) appears in all its different forms no fewer than 182 times throughout the document.

The parties to the agreement each have a right to veto any proposal that emerges from these discussions.

This means there will be many opportunities for Swedish civil society to intervene and make its voice heard. Immigrant, expat and asylum-seeker organisations will need to organise themselves like never before if they want to defend multiculturalism and prevent Sweden’s open society from becoming a distant memory.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

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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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