Sweden: The Rise of Threat From the Far Right
Author(s): EMAN Staff
Sweden is an exception in worldwide comparisons of far-right violence and militancy, having a significantly stronger and more resilient extreme-right movement than its Nordic neighbours. Explicitly, Sweden might be defined as the Nordic epicentre for the region's radical far-right movements. Far-right terrorism has been highlighted as a rising and increasing threat to Swedish democracy by various monitoring organisations and governmental authorities in recent years, including the Swedish Security Service.
Despite grave predictions of violence from Islamist organisations, particularly Daesh cells, Sweden’s biggest danger today comes from the extreme right, which intends to exploit overwhelming public resistance to the flood of immigration and the COVID-related strains on public health and other services. According to Klas Friberg, Head of the Swedish Security Service, the violent right-wing extremist ideology that was once exclusive to a tiny and well-organised white power movement is spreading and drawing more people. He further stated that “with various right-wing extremist groups starting to converge, certain individuals might be propelled to carry out xenophobic crimes,” and “this development must be closely monitored,” he emphasised.
Historically, the rise of right-wing extremism and the development of terrorist groups in Sweden did not happen spontaneously. On the outside shell of Sweden’s political system existed several right-wing parties going back to Goran Oredsson’s founding of the Nordiska Rikspartiet (the Nordic Realm Party, NRP) in 1956. It was most powerful in Malmö, which would become the epicentre of several racist organisations in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the party’s key members, including its first long-term party leader, Anders Klarström, were sentenced to jail for inciting violence, racism, and harassment against anti-racist activists.
Today’s Sweden is home to a number of other extremist organisations such as the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), which is a hardcore socialist, transnational neo-Nazi movement that was founded by neo-Nazi nationalists in 1997. The core objective of NRM is to unite the Nordic nations into a unified, nationalist-socialist state, either through elections or revolution: “All non-ethnic northern Europeans will be repatriated, and power will be reclaimed from the global Zionist elite.” Additionally, the movement is anti-minority and clearly expresses that immigrants and people of non-Nordic heritage are not welcomed in Sweden and should leave immediately. Also, NRM’s political program routinely criticises existing government leadership, blaming prior and current government coalitions for Sweden’s current political and socio-economic state. These NRM extremist views imply that non-Nordic immigrants, especially Arabs and Africans, are ‘second-class’ citizens that have no place in the Nordic nations nor in their parliaments.
Today, NRM maintains a website and active social media profiles. It also produces and distributes exclusive podcasts through Radio Nordfront, which was launched by its member Robin Palmblad. That said, the Swedish Security Service has been aware of a trend in Sweden, Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere, in which individuals on the periphery of the white power movement are becoming radicalised online, posing a threat of assaults or significant violent crime. They are being encouraged and brainwashed to commit extremist acts, in a similar way to how other extremist organisations push their followers to utilise whatever tools are available to them.
In stark contrast to movements like NRP in the 1980s and 1990s, today’s Nordic movements, especially NRM and the neo-Nazi rooted Sweden Democrats party that has been surging since the 2018 elections after securing 18 percent of the votes, focus on word-of-mouth propaganda rather than physical violence. Part of the explanation is that modern activists have a higher level of political maturity, which is founded on the belief that their views and objectives can be implemented and achieved through the political process. The fact that Sweden has opened the doors for refugees more than any other Nordic country, “right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats,” according to Jo Becker from the New York Times.
During the past couple of years, Sweden has been intensifying its work and carefully tracking and evaluating violent right-wing extremist individuals who are capable of turning words into action. In that term, Klas Friberg says that “hate rhetoric and increased polarisation accelerate the development in which violent right-wing extremist ideology might be going from something considered extreme to something considered normal. This must be addressed by society as a whole, at every level, and this must be done in time.”
