Sweden will hold general elections on September 11, 2022. At the same time, the country is rocked by a wave of violent crime that is unprecedented in modern Scandinavian history.
For the first time, crime tops the list of voters’ most important concerns in the run-up to the elections. “It’s going to be a very unique type of Swedish election with a very unusual issue at the top of the agenda,” Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, professor of political science at Gothenburg University, told newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Forty-one percent of those surveyed said that law and order are the most important issues in society, as well as the most important political issues.
Patrik Öhberg, political scientist at the SOM Institute, states that “This is the first election campaign in modern times where it’s so high up on the agenda that all parties, whether they want to or not, have to discuss the issue.” This could benefit the Moderate Party, the Christian Democrats, or the Sweden Democrats. On the other side of the political spectrum, it could be detrimental to the Left Party, the Greens, and the ruling Social Democrats.
The Social Democratic Party has headed the Swedish government since 2014. During these eight years, crime has continued growing to intolerable levels nationwide. Sweden has in recent years suffered attacks involving bombs, hand grenades or other explosive devices on a weekly basis, sometimes several times a week.
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In November 2021, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven stepped down as party leader and PM, and Magdalena Andersson became Sweden’s first female prime minister. In April 2022, several Swedish cities experienced violent riots and attacks against the police by Muslims when anti-Islamic activist Rasmus Paludan tried to burn copies of the Koran. Andersson then admitted that a lack of integration had contributed to gang violence, saying that there are “strong forces that are ready to go to great lengths to harm our society.”
“Segregation has been allowed to go so far that Sweden now has parallel societies,” Andersson said according to Aftonbladet. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities… Integration has been too poor while we have had large-scale migration. Society has also been too weak.”
Others, after having allowed these problems to grow largely unchecked for decades, have belatedly come to the same conclusion. Ulf Kristersson, leader of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party, in August 2022 co-authored a column which admitted that “Sweden has lost control over crime. While the violence is getting worse, the perpetrators are getting younger.”
Read more: Gatestone Institute
