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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Dreadlocked bureaucrat: Who’s the Swedish Green Party’s likely next leader?

Sweden's former culture minister, Amanda Lind, has been put forward as the party's likely next leader. Here's what you need to know about her and why she can't be reduced to a hippy haircut.

Published: 8 April 2024 13:24 CEST
Dreadlocked bureaucrat: Who's the Swedish Green Party's likely next leader?
Amanda Lind speaking at the press conference announcing her as the Green Party's lead candidate to take over from Märta Stenevi. Photo: Magnus Lejhall/TT

What’s happened? 

The Green Party’s election committee has recommended that the party elect Amanda Lind, 43, as its new co-leader. 

The party officially calls its leaders “spokespersons”, or språkrör, and always has one man and one woman to ensure a gender-equal leadership. 

Lind, former culture minister and former party secretary, beat the party’s finance spokesperson, Janine Alm Ericson, and the party’s parliamentary group leader, Annika Hirvonen, to win the committee’s backing.

In a press release announcing its decision, the committee praised Lind’s “ability to communicate a vision and at the same time connect that to current political issues”, adding that her “particular experience in cultural issues” meant that she “fitted extremely well” with the party’s other leader Daniel Helldén who is more focused on issues like carbon emissions, energy, transport, and the green industrial transformation. 

So is she the leader yet? 

No. Although she has the backing of the party’s selection committee, Lind still needs to win the vote at a special additional party congress on April 28th, where 265 representatives of the party’s local districts have their say.

One of her two rivals, Hirvonen, has announced that she will not stand, but her other rival, Alm Ericson, is still in the race and got the public backing of a long list of top Green Party politicians, as well as the party’s youth group in a public opinion piece in Aftonbladet on Saturday.

“Amanda is a good candidate but I also have broad support in the party, not least from Green Youth. That means a lot. That’s why I’ve decided to continue putting forward my candidacy,” Janine Alm Ericson told SvD in an email.

Who is Amanda Lind? 

Don’t go on the dreadlocks alone.

Lind is seen within the party as a formidable organiser, who served as Sweden’s culture minister between January 2019 until the Green Party left the government in November 2021, and was party secretary between 2016 and 2019.

As a minister, she played a key role in bringing in and then lifting Covid-19 restrictions on theatre performances and sports grounds, standing firm and defending her position, despite calls for her resignation from the novelist and comedian Jonas Gardell and others. 

She also attended the award of a prize to Gui Minhai, the imprisoned Chinese writer, pushing China’s ambassador to Sweden to threaten to ban her from entering his country. 

In her private life, she is more a nerd than a rastafarian reggae obsessive, enjoying live action role-playing (LARPing) and at some point learning Esperanto, an invented language designed to facilitate global communication. In 2019, she gave a video address to the World Esperanto Congress in quite fluent sounding Esperanto. 

She grew up in Luleå in the far north of Sweden, meaning she is a good balance with Helldén, who comes from Lidingö, an upmarket suburb of Stockholm. 

What does her recommendation mean for the Green Party? 

Taken together with the ponytail sported by her male counterpart, it shows the party doubling down on non-conventional hairstyle choices. 

More seriously, when it comes to the issues of policy and strategy, it pushes back slightly against Helldén and his purported preference for a party more focused on narrow environmental issues, such as climate, energy, and biodiversity.

Lind is seen as more focused on social and cultural issues, like the rights of Sami people and immigration, even though in her campaign to win the backing of party members, she emphasised her wish to attack the government’s failings when it comes to climate policy, and said that the Green Party needs to focus on pushing for a “social just green transition”, which does not punish people living in the countryside or on lower incomes.  

Alm Ericson is seen as more closely aligned to Helldén’s more technology-focused approach, even though she, in much the same way as Lind, has emphasised her engagement in social issues in her campaign for the support of party members. 

Member comments

  1. Lind is also a qualified psychologist from Umeå University. Don’t be fooled by the hairstyle and charming smile and ‘culture’. She’s as hard as nails. Those who had hoped that the Green Party will soon sink and disappear below the 4% parliamentary threshold might be in for disappointment if she gets the job…

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POLITICS

‘Very little debate’ on consequences of Sweden’s crime and migration clampdown

Sweden’s political leaders are putting the population’s well-being at risk by moving the country in a more authoritarian direction, according to a recent report.

Published: 29 April 2024 08:56 CEST
'Very little debate' on consequences of Sweden's crime and migration clampdown

The Liberties Rule of Law report shows Sweden backsliding across more areas than any other of the 19 European Union member states monitored, fuelling concerns that the country risks breaching its international human rights obligations, the report says.

“We’ve seen this regression in other countries for a number of years, such as Poland and Hungary, but now we see it also in countries like Sweden,” says John Stauffer, legal director of the human rights organisation Civil Rights Defenders, which co-authored the Swedish section of the report.

The report, compiled by independent civil liberties groups, examines six common challenges facing European Union member states.

Sweden is shown to be regressing in five of these areas: the justice system, media environment, checks and balances, enabling framework for civil society and systemic human rights issues.

The only area where Sweden has not regressed since 2022 is in its anti-corruption framework, where there has been no movement in either a positive or negative direction.

Source: Liberties Rule of Law report

As politicians scramble to combat an escalation in gang crime, laws are being rushed through with too little consideration for basic rights, according to Civil Rights Defenders.

Stauffer cites Sweden’s new stop-and-search zones as a case in point. From April 25th, police in Sweden can temporarily declare any area a “security zone” if there is deemed to be a risk of shootings or explosive attacks stemming from gang conflicts.

Once an area has received this designation, police will be able to search people and cars in the area without any concrete suspicion.

“This is definitely a piece of legislation where we see that it’s problematic from a human rights perspective,” says Stauffer, adding that it “will result in ethnic profiling and discrimination”.

Civil Rights Defenders sought to prevent the new law and will try to challenge it in the courts once it comes into force, Stauffer tells The Local in an interview for the Sweden in Focus Extra podcast. 

He also notes that victims of racial discrimination at the hands of the Swedish authorities had very little chance of getting a fair hearing as actions by the police or judiciary are “not even covered by the Discrimination Act”.

READ ALSO: ‘Civil rights groups in Sweden can fight this government’s repressive proposals’

Stauffer also expresses concerns that an ongoing migration clampdown risks splitting Sweden into a sort of A and B team, where “the government limits access to rights based on your legal basis for being in the country”.

The report says the government’s migration policies take a “divisive ‘us vs them’ approach, which threatens to increase rather than reduce existing social inequalities and exclude certain groups from becoming part of society”.

Proposals such as the introduction of a requirement for civil servants to report undocumented migrants to the authorities would increase societal mistrust and ultimately weaken the rule of law in Sweden, the report says.

The lack of opposition to the kind of surveillance measures that might previously have sparked an outcry is a major concern, says Stauffer.

Politicians’ consistent depiction of Sweden as a country in crisis “affects the public and creates support for these harsh measures”, says Stauffer. “And there is very little talk and debate about the negative consequences.”

Hear John Stauffer from Civil Rights Defender discuss the Liberties Rule of Law report in the The Local’s Sweden in Focus Extra podcast for Membership+ subscribers.

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