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In Sweden, where I live, we have just experienced a national election that represents the culmination of years of intensifying polarization. Anyone living in the United States will recognize this pattern, for a country as culturally committed to consensus as Sweden, is shocking. As an American about to vote in the U. S. midterm elections. In the U. S. , interconnections are on my mind. As a descendant of Nazis who has spent many years immersed in history, I feel intensely what is at stake for democracy and peace in the world.
In the run-up to the 2018 Swedish election cycle, my friend Hédi Fried invited the leader of the Swedish Moderate Party to lunch at her apartment. Hedi is a national icon in Sweden: Holocaust survivor, psychologist and warrior during democracy and human rights for some 40 years.
Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderate Party, one of the many party leaders invited to meetings at Hedi’s house, to communicate his reports and experience. On the table, a smörgåstorta, or sandwich cake, your favorite Swedish savory cake. in 1945 on a Red Cross ship with his younger sister. They were emaciated and sick, having survived several concentration camps; their parents, murdered.
During his meeting with Hedi, Kristersson vowed never to engage in any form of cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, a political party that had made significant gains in parliament. The reason: the Sweden Democrats do not constitute any party. After World War II, the party emerged from a neo-Nazi organization called Behåll Sverige Svensk (BSS), or Keep Sweden Swedish. Its founders had Nazi affiliations and were even members of Hitler’s Waffen SS. Over the years, the Sweden Democrats have tried to blank their party, yet their behavior, even in recent years, suggests that it cannot escape its committed beginnings.
Despite all this, as votes were counted in Sweden’s last national election in September 2022, it became increasingly transparent that the Moderate Party could only govern if it entered into coalition with the Sweden Democrats, who for the first time outperformed moderates to become Sweden’s largest party of the moment. (The Swedish Social Democrats, the party largely guilty of transforming Sweden from one of Europe’s poorest countries into one of the richest and most progressive maximums, remains the largest political party, but did not have enough majority to govern. ) Needless to say, Kristersson complied, making many alliances with the devil.
Like me, who spent decades trying to figure out how his grandparents, among millions of other Germans, may have been part of a political force that eventually drove fascists into the “beautiful room” of German politics, this all sounds terrifying. . For my friend Hédi, the Holocaust survivor, this is not just the reneging on a promise, but one of the many symptoms of Europe’s collective forgetfulness of the risks of allowing the far right to succeed in positions of power.
History tells us that it was the same slip in German politics in the early 1930s that brought the Nazis to power. Hitler was given the reins on the basis of the conservative elite’s misperception that he could update him.
While the Sweden Democrats have so far failed to secure any ministerial posts in the new government, at the start of negotiations, their leader, Jimmie Åkesson, insisted that this arrangement would come at a price. So far, among other important roles, Sweden has been entrusted to the democrats with the chairmanship of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee (before a year in which Sweden will assume the presidency of the European Council).
Some might say that Hédi and I are exaggerating, that we are so obsessed with the story that we don’t see it clearly in this new era with its new actors. They might say, as even some minorities in Sweden (including some Jews) do not make an unusual cause with the anti-Muslim stance of the Sweden Democrats, forget the realities of violent crime in Sweden’s densely populated immigrant regions, and the rise of disorders such as anti-Semitism. Worst of all, they may simply say that we deny the same thing we are trying to do through our activism: democracy itself, in which the final results of free and fair elections will have to be respected.
Despite their anti-globalist nationalist blustery, the Sweden Democrats have for decades been connected to the far right around the world, contributing to the global erosion of democracy. Historian Tim Snyder recently summed up the existential gravity of this phenomenon for humans when he stated that “in the long run it is democracy or nothing at all. “Along with far-right and extremist parties in Western Europe, the Sweden Democrats have long sought legitimacy through networks and alliances across Europe, at most recently through the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) in the European Parliament. While there are nuances among Europe’s far-right parties, they all face a challenge intrinsic to their kind of politics: a platform founded on scapegoating a nation’s challenges does not lead to smart governance, adding respect for human rights. rights and encourages the expression of discontent through violence.
In Sweden, this penchant for violence was chillingly exemplified on a summer night in Stockholm in 2014, when members of the Swedish Democrats leadership, armed with lead pipes, shouted sexist and racist comments and physically assaulted, among others, an Iranian-speaking comedian of Kurdish origin who in the past had been interrupted through the party. The 3 members of the Sweden Democrats lied to the media when asked about the incident, and subsequently only one of them left the party. No disciplinary action was taken. Unlike the other two and, despite extensive evidence provided through a video and confirmation from Swedish human rights body EXPO, Åkesson claimed that the events had been distorted. Democrats, illustrating how the far right is turning public norms into what constitutes appropriate behavior.
It’s hard to see the analogy with the threatening and violent environment that Trumpism has fostered, adding to the events that took place at the U. S. Capitol. U. S. Air Force on January 6, 2021.
As a new war rages out on the European continent, the risk posed to all of us, wherever we are, by the rise of political forces like the Sweden Democrats is related to the way the global far-right ecosystem has been fed through coordinated disinformation. Encouraged by Moscú. Se can say that Putin’s war in Ukraine, looming over the world with its risk of nuclear escalation, is less likely to have happened had Putin not been emboldened by his belief in political and social chaos and rupture in the West, which Russian trolls have facilitated for years through their far-right messages.
In the public chant of the Swedish Democrats in the election of Donald Trump, a president who once invited Russia to help him undermine his political opponent, and who later claimed that he trusted Putin’s word rather than that of his own intelligence agencies, and his curious outburst over his uninformed apocalyptic portrayal of Sweden, a liberal democracy a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, they played into Putin’s hands.
In today’s world, more than ever, what happens in Sweden relates to the United States and vice versa. Kristersson, the moderate leader, never returned Hedi’s follow-up call after that meeting.
So, I America. How will we respond?
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Julie Lindahl Twitter contributor CognoscentiJulie Lindahl is an editor and democracy activist. She is the protagonist of “The Pendulum: The Search for a Granddaughter of Her Family’s Forbidden Nazi Past. “
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