The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  One expects bile and lies from these kinds of people, but what has been even more dismaying has been the way in which their bigotry has infected the broader political discourse in Denmark, to the extent that even centrist parties routinely generalise negatively about immigrants and Muslims. One of the most pernicious aspects of this is the widespread use of the terms ‘new-’ or ‘second-generation’ to describe Danes, Swedes, Finns or Norwegians who hold legitimate passports for their countries; in many cases were born in those countries; pay taxes in those countries; vote in those countries; and contribute to those societies in so many ways, yet who are, you know, not really one of them. People who are, well, how to put it, a bit darker. Could you imagine anyone in the US referring to people as ‘second-generation Americans’, or even British politicians talking of ‘New Britons’?

  On the other hand, ‘leave it to the politicians’ – which is essentially what Jonsson is saying – sounds pretty feeble and, like it or not, the Danish People’s Party, and to a lesser extent the Sweden Democrats, do speak for a significant proportion of their respective populations. And what of freedom of speech? Shouldn’t the right wing be allowed to make fools of themselves like every other politician? Isn’t the electorate grown up enough to make up their own minds? That was certainly the case with the buffoonish leader of the British National Party in the run-up to the last general election.

  The simple fact is that trying to pretend the Sweden Democrats do not exist has not worked as far as their popular vote is concerned: the party was more successful than ever at the last election, scoring 5.7 per cent of the votes, enough to win them twenty seats in parliament.

  It was time to put my money where my liberal, free-speech mouth was, and go and meet the Sweden Democrats in their new lair.

  ‘We would lower immigration by approximately 90 per cent,’ Sweden Democrat spokesman Eric Myrin told me when I met him in their plush new offices close to the Swedish parliament (the Riksdag). ‘Especially when it comes to asylum seekers and close-to-kin immigration, which is one of the biggest groups coming in today. Basically, if you own a pizza shop you can bring more relatives from Somalia to make pizzas, and there is no stop to it now.’

  Ah, the well-known scourge of the Somali pizza chef. Like his smooth-talking leader Jimmie Åkesson, Myrin was young and smart and spouted his anti-immigrant rhetoric as if it were the mildest statement of fact. I had come expecting to meet pale, sinister-looking men in long black leather coats and round wire glasses (and, actually, there was someone precisely fitting that description sitting in the corner, monitoring our conversation), but Myrin was dressed in dark jeans and a jacket, like any other aspiring middle-way Scandinavian politician.

  Myrin continued in this vein, ranting about segregated public swimming pools and lax sentencing, and claiming that Swedish courts allowed immigrants to beat their children ‘because it’s their culture to beat their kids’.

  ‘Immigrants pick on Swedes for no reason whatsoever because they know they can dominate them, because they are more aggressive. They are more prone to violence than the Swedes. I experienced it in school, and my friends experienced it.’ He claimed that immigrants had a ‘completely different way of regarding human life.’ But didn’t the Swedes also have quite a track record of being a bit ‘fighty’? Was he not not familiar with the Thirty Years War, for example?1

  ‘Yeah, yeah, of course we did wars, but—’

  ‘You rampaged across Europe.’

  ‘Sure, yeah, things change.’

  ‘And,’ I added. ‘I might be a bit cross if I was, say, an Iranian refugee, and the Swedish authorities herded me into a ghetto with no chance of getting a job or building a future, and people like you branded me a threat and a menace. I might not react all that well either.’

  ‘If you come to Sweden you have absolutely no reason to be pissed off at anything. If you come to Sweden you get everything, you get health care, you get education. You can learn Swedish, you have every single opportunity.’

  Sweden accepts around 100,000 immigrants a year, he told me, aghast. But I happened to have taken a closer look at the figures, and knew how many actually leave Sweden each year. Was Myrin aware of the figure for emigrants? I wondered.

  He shifted in his seat. ‘It’s about fifty thousand.’

  ‘So, actually, net immigration is fifty thousand.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s not just about figures,’ he said. ‘It’s about who they are.’

  ‘But the Swedish economy is doing well, you need the labour force, don’t you?’

  ‘They’ve been saying that for forty years, and every year we have had unemployment at 10 per cent.’

  ‘Which would suggest there is a fixed level of unemployment, irrespective of the level of immigration . . .’

  There seemed little point in getting bogged down in statistics – Myrin was hardly likely to have a Damascene epiphany and run off to join the Social Democrats in the office next door – so I asked him about the media’s exclusion of his party in the run-up to the last election.

  ‘Yes, the media has been extremely anti our party, with editorials talking about sending us to concentration camps and stuff,’ he said. ‘They do not allow us to advertise. We have been stigmatised; politically, no one will cooperate with us.’

  I wondered out loud if this perhaps had something to do with their infamous election ad, which was banned in Sweden but is, of course, available on YouTube, thus rendering the ban not only futile but lending the film an illicit thrill. It depicted a herd of hijab-clad women barging past an elderly ethnic Swedish woman to reach a table where money was being handed out by politicians, the implication being that the latter were suffering financially in Sweden’s welfare redistribution. Or, perhaps it was because the party was, as Jonsson had pointed out, originally (and under a previous name) formed by neo-Nazis, and that from time to time photographs surface of their members in Nazi uniform. Had Myrin ever dressed up in a Nazi uniform to mark Hitler’s birthday, as members of his party had been exposed as doing? I wondered.

  ‘We don’t really have a neo-Nazi past in that sense,’ he bristled. ‘We’ve had members we didn’t know were Nazis, but the party has never been racist.’

  I left the Riksdag deeply depressed that so many Swedes had voted for the kinds of people who believe that foreigners are intrinsically more violent and aggressive than they are. I was beginning to sympathise with the Swedish intelligentsia’s conspiracy of silence.

  On a positive note, there is always a chance that the Sweden Democrats might disappear without trace by the next election, although that is looking increasingly unlikely. Their popularity began to slip in the polls almost immediately after the election as it rapidly became apparent they hadn’t the first idea of how to operate as a grown-up party on a national scale, but as I write, in mid-2013, in the last few months they have surged once more and are now approaching the 10 per cent mark. This is despite a number of scandals that have vividly exposed the party’s racist underbelly, not least an incident that saw one of their MPs, Lars Isovaara, being disciplined by the leadership after falsely claiming that he had been robbed by immigrants (he had left his possessions in a restaurant) and then oinking like a pig and spitting at a security guard whom he believed to be a Muslim. It does not require a great leap of imagination to assume this is how most of his colleagues in the party would like to behave if they thought they could get away with it.

  The historic precedent is hopeful though: a previous right-wing party that had even greater success in Sweden in the early nineties disappeared as quickly as it had emerged.

  We can but hope.

  * * *

  1 Under the notoriously bloodthirsty Gustaf II Adolf, Sweden fielded what was at the time the largest army in the world – 90,000 soldiers – and commenced a three-decades-long campaign of slaughter and rape across Central Europe that is said to have resulted in a greater number of deaths, proportional to the population of the time, than the two World Wars
combined, or the plague. One Swedish journalist proudly told me that Austrian grandmothers still warn their grandchildren, ‘Be nice, mein Kind, otherwise the Swede will come and get you.’

  Chapter 7

  The party

  SWEDEN IS A totalitarian state: discuss.

  No, really, I am serious. I was beginning to think that the Danish newspaper editor Anne Knudsen was on to something when she had used that word, albeit tentatively, to describe Sweden. My dictionary defines totalitarianism as ‘a form of government that includes control of everything under one authority, and allows no opposition,’ and for much of the twentieth century Sweden was effectively a one-party state, the party being the Social Democrats. They regulated every aspect of their dutiful, acquiescent citizens’ lives, doing their utmost to ensure adherence to the prescribed modern, progressive social norms. Of course Sweden was no Soviet Union – its wealth was generally distributed much more fairly, and the goods and services offered to its citizens were of a far higher quality. It is not as if Herr and Fru Svensson had their property confiscated and were sent to work in the salt mines with half a turnip to gnaw on. Instead of potato queues and Trabants, the Swedes were rewarded for their collective compliance with a kind of modern, secular Valhalla.

  They called it Folkhemmet (the ‘People’s Home’). It was the most generous, progressive and extensive welfare state in the world. Folkhemmet ensured its citizens never went hungry or homeless, that they were cared for when they were sick, and provided for when they grew old. For much of the twentieth century the Swedes enjoyed full employment, some of the highest wages in the world, ample national holidays, and unprecedented economic prosperity. Not much to kick against there. Perhaps, then, ‘benign totalitarianism’ might be a better term.

  I was rather pleased with myself for coming up with this notion of benign totalitarianism, until I discovered that the great Polar author Roland Huntford had described Sweden in precisely those terms as long ago as 1971, painting a picture in his book The New Totalitarians of the country as a socialist dystopia in which personal freedoms, ambition and humanity had been sacrificed to the Social Democrats’ ideals. ‘Modern Sweden has fulfilled Huxley’s specifications for the new totalitarianism,’ he wrote. ‘A centralised administration rules people who love their servitude.’

  In the 1980s, the German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger had spotted something of this too, describing in his book Europe, Europe how the Swedish government regulated ‘the affairs of individuals to a degree unparalleled in other free societies’, and had gradually eroded not just its citizens’ rights, but also somehow crushed their spirit: ‘It really looked as if the Social Democrats . . . had succeeded in taming the human animal where other quite different regimes, from theocracy to Bolshevism, had failed,’ he writes. ‘Anyone who opposes the Social Democrats tends to apologise for his stance, often without noticing it.’

  Enzensberger was referring to the extraordinary levels of conformity and consensus he had observed during a general election, but also the fact that the Swedish Social Democrats had enjoyed a virtually unchallenged stranglehold on power for most of the twentieth century. They made General Franco look like a dilettante, the Soviet Communist Party mere fly-by-nights. The Social Democrats grabbed the keys to the Riksdag in 1920 and held on to them, virtually uninterrupted, from 1932 to 1976. They lost power briefly, but then took it back for another fifteen years before the end of the last century. It was not until 2010 that a non-Social Democratic government – the current Moderate coalition, led by bald role model Fredrik Reinfeldt – was voted in for a second term.

  Hand in hand with the unions (until recently, if you joined one of the larger Swedish unions, you automatically became a member of the Social Democratic party), and together with a small group of industrialists, the party set wages and ensured that Swedish industry was almost completely free from labour disputes (at least up until the national strikes of 1980). As payback for such a compliant workforce, the government implemented some of the most stringent labour market regulations in the world (still to this day it is inordinately difficult and costly for Swedish companies to sack anyone); the most generous unemployment benefits; and by 1975 had made it compulsory for union representatives to sit on the boards of all companies. True to the totalitarian template, Social Democrats dominated the judiciary, ran the state television and radio broadcasting monopolies, and guided Swedish culture through the influence of extensive government arts funding. ‘At the turn of the century, the majority of bishops, generals, directors general, university professors and ambassadors were Social Democrats or sympathisers,’ writes veteran Swedish journalist Ulf Nilson in his book What Happened to Sweden?

  There were few aspects of the Swedes’ lives that their government did not strive to control, including their pay, how they raised their children, how much they drank, what they watched on TV, how much holiday they took, and their views on the Vietnam War. And the Swedes, it seems, were the most willing of puppets, ‘world record-holders in docility’, as Enzensberger puts it.

  One famous, and in its way really quite magnificent, example of the Swedish population’s malleability is that, when the government decided, on the night of 3 September 1967, to switch from driving on the right to driving on the left, they promptly did so without so much as a honked horn. It was also decided that the formal Swedish mode of address, ni (their equivalent of the French vous) was undemocratic and should cease to be used (the laid-back Danes let their equivalent, de, drift out of common usage). In a similar vein, the Swedes have been mulling over abolishing gender-specific pronouns – the Swedish equivalents of ‘he’ or ‘she’ (han and hun) – the concern being that they contribute to negative gender stereotyping. The idea is that everyone should be referred to as hen, regardless of their gender – one Stockholm kindergarten recently made hen the mandatory pronoun. Elsewhere, I recently read – and I am not making this up – that members of Sörmland County Council had passed a motion, so to speak, to insist that men working for the local council should urinate sitting down, with the ultimate aim of making their public toilets genderless.

  Reading about all this you get a sense of the almost religious fervour with which the Social Democrats went about dreaming up and implementing their radical policies. They do seem to have been on a kind of modernist crusade. No figure epitomised this self-righteous, finger-wagging approach more than the Social Democratic prime minister of the seventies and eighties, Olof Palme.

  ‘To the outside world, in so far as it noticed him, he stood for everything about the country’s pious, leftist internationalism,’ writes Andrew Brown. ‘Within the country, he symbolised the arrogance and sense of entitlement of the Social Democratic establishment better than anyone else. They had inherited a poor, patriarchal, and formal society, and turned it into a rich, feminist, and fiercely egalitarian one.’

  Olof Palme was born into an aristocratic, land-owning family but, after travelling in the United States and being shocked by the inequality he discovered there, he returned to Sweden in the late 1950s and joined the Social Democrats. He became a protegé of Tage Erlander – the longest-serving prime minister Sweden has ever had – eventually replacing him in that post in 1969. Under Palme, Sweden’s welfare system expanded exponentially in the fields of health care, childcare, housing, care for the elderly and much more, and taxes rose to cover the costs and redistribute Sweden’s fast-growing wealth. Palme was famously proactive, some might say ‘preachy’, on the international stage, cleverly spinning Sweden’s neutrality into a position from which he would moralise at length on international conflicts, marching alongside the North Vietnamese ambassador to Sweden in protest against the American war there, and welcoming three hundred deserters from the US military (prompting Henry Kissinger to wonder aloud why the Swedes had not been roused to make similar protests against the Nazis in 1940).

  After his American epiphany, Palme strove to foster a man-of-the-people image; even when he became prime minister he st
ill lived with his wife, Lisbet, in a humdrum terraced house in Stockholm, eschewing the fripperies of power such as limousines and bodyguards. These ‘man of the people’ poses would turn out to have fatal consequences.

  At around midnight on 28 February 1986, as the Palmes were walking home from the cinema, an unknown assailant fired several shots at them, injuring Lisbet but killing Palme. The shock to this peaceful nation of having its prime minister gunned down in the street is hard to overestimate, indeed Palme’s murder still resonates among an entire generation of Scandinavians. As historian Tony Griffiths writes: ‘Sweden suffered a collective nervous breakdown.’

  The trauma was compounded by the fact that the Swedish police were exposed as hopelessly amateurish in the aftermath of the assassination, failing to set up roadblocks on the night and taking for ever to charge someone over the murder. Eventually, a junkie, Christer Pettersson, who had previously served time for killing a man with a bayonet but had been released after serving just a few years, was found guilty of Palme’s murder. He was later acquitted on appeal and the case remains technically unsolved to this day. Rumours have since swirled that the assassination was the work of either the CIA or the KGB (indeed, it is indicative of the fine-edged, some would say hypocritical, foreign policy line Palme walked that both had motive enough), although Petterson, who died in 2004, confessed on several occasions and is generally believed to have been guilty.