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Former Swedish PM Bildt worried Putin will ‘take Trump for a ride’

Sweden's former prime minister and foreign minister Carl Bildt has expressed his concerns over how Vladimir Putin could influence Donald Trump, warning that the Russian leader may "take Trump for a ride".

Published: 2 May 2017 12:43 CEST

Former Swedish PM Bildt worried Putin will 'take Trump for a ride'

Former Swedish PM Carl Bildt (right) is concerned about Vladimir Putin's influence on Donald Trump. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP & Joakim Goksör/TT

Bildt made the comments in an interview with US news site Politico, pointing out that Putin is “to put it mildly, a somewhat more experienced player” than the US President, and adding that it will be interesting to see when the two meet for the first time “whether Putin will take Trump for a ride. That is not to be excluded”.

The Swede highlighted the '10 minute history lesson' on China and Korea that Chinese leader Xi Jinping gave Trump in an April meeting, and noted that Putin is clearly “going to try to do the same thing in trying to influence a man who doesn't have very many core convictions. So that is still a point of worry where that ends up”.

Bildt, an outspoken critic of Trump who once pondered what the American might have been smoking when he made his infamous “last night in Sweden” comments, told Politico that Swedes were both irked by the US President's attacks on the Nordic nation as well as entertained.

“People were appalled and then there was an element of sort of entertainment. They thought the man had gone bananas, one way or the other. They couldn't begin to understand it.”

“It was a somewhat unsettling thing to see the president of the United States without any factual basis whatsoever lunge out against a small country in the way that he did,” he added.

In February, Trump controversially suggested a serious incident had taken place in Sweden “last night”, much to the confusion of Swedes, who wondered what he meant after an uneventful evening in the country.

The US leader later clarified that he was referring to a Fox News report which incorrectly claimed crimes like rape had risen sharply in the country after the 2015 refugee crisis.

READ ALSO: A closer look at the Fox segment on Sweden

REVEALED: Sweden Democrats' secret social media 'troll factory'

In the Kalla Fakta programme for broadcaster TV4, a reporter spent five months working undercover for the Sweden Democrats, first on the YouTube channel Riks, previously owned by the party, and later for the party’s communications team.

“I was undercover for a whole year, five months of which I was working [for the party],” Kalla Fakta’s reporter Daniel Andersson told The Local. “Two of them I was on Riks, the YouTube channel, and three of them I was in the communications department.”

During this period, Andersson wore a hidden camera to show how the YouTube channel, which the party claims is independent, is in fact closely linked with the party.

Andersson said he found out about the troll factory just before moving over to the communications department.

“They are in the same office building, Riks rents their office from the Sweden Democrats, so during lunch the departments often met, ate lunch together and talked a lot about it. That’s where I overheard secretive talks about anonymous accounts on social media, and they didn’t want to say what their name was or why they had them.”

The Sweden Democrats are also Riks’ largest source of financing, with daily meetings taking place between the channel’s owner, Jacob Hagnell, and Sweden Democrat head of communications Joakim Wallerstein.

Kalla Fakta’s report revealed that the party’s communications wing has been tasked with managing a large number of anonymous social media accounts, referred to within the party as a “troll factory”, an organised group of fake accounts with the aim of influencing public opinion and debate by spreading pro-Sweden Democrat content.

“We’re going to talk a lot more about how they operate in the next episode, in a week,” Andersson said. “But what we saw very early was that it was very, very systematic, it’s organised. And the purpose is to create a huge load of posts on different social media to create an illusion of the fact that the Sweden Democrats and their image of the world and of Sweden is larger than it is.”

“The boss is Joakim Wallerstein, the communications chief of the Sweden Democrats. He’s also the mastermind behind this – we also identified Riks as a part of it, where he is creating a conservative ecosystem, troll factory, to manipulate people’s views of the world,” he added.

Back in 2022, the Sweden Democrats were accused of running a “troll factory” by left-wing newspaper Dagens ETC. At the time, the party rejected the accusations, calling ETC’s article “unserious and obvious activism” in an email to SVT, while admitting that a group called Battlefield, responsible for moderating the party’s comments boxes on social media, did exist at one point.

In the new Kalla Fakta programme and in another interview with Dagens ETC, Wallerstein admits that these anonymous accounts exist, although he rejects the term “troll factory”.

“I don’t think I’ve been running so called troll sites, for the simple reason that I haven’t been spreading false information,” he told Kalla Fakta.

Andersson believes this is nothing more than damage control from the party.

“He doesn’t want to acknowledge that it is a troll factory. He doesn’t see a problem with the fact that they are anonymous, or the fact that the connection to the party is hidden,” Andersson said.

By Paul O’Mahony and Becky Waterton

Hear TV4’s reporter Daniel Andersson explain more about the investigation in the next episode of The Local’s podcast, Sweden in Focus. Out on Friday, May 10th.

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