media and society in general handle extremists, particularly right-wing
extremists?
This is a hot topic in Britain, of course, after the BBC invited the
leader of the British National Party to appear on its flagship
political-debate programme last week. Coincidentally, a very comparable
discussion has blown up here in Sweden. A week ago, the newspaper
Aftonbladet - left-leaning and part-owned by the blue-collar trade-union
confederation - surprised everyone by publishing an article by Jimmie
Åkesson, leader of the country's BNP-equivalent, the Sweden Democrats.
The contents of the article, entitled "Muslims are our greatest foreign
threat", has been furiously condemned by everyone else. The decision to
publish it has also been attacked, but not so broadly.
The BNP and the Sweden Democrats have a lot in common. Neither has seats
in the national parliament. Both have a few percent in the opinion
polls, which was enough for the BNP, but not the Sweden Democrats, to
win MEPs in June's European election. Both have roots in openly racist
organisations, which distinguishes them sharply from the Progress Party
in Norway, and even from the crude scaremongering of the Danish People's
Party.
Still, that latter Danish party has clearly inspired Åkesson. His
Aftonbladet article did not mention the sort of biological-racist and
fantasy-history stuff that the BNP still seems keen on. Instead, and as
the title suggests, Islam was the main target. This makes it harder for
mainstream politicians and media to handle - perhaps especially in Sweden.
Åkesson's article was in many ways a clever gambit. It contained a long
list of assertions about the alleged malign influence of Islam on
Sweden. Several newspapers dissected the list in minute detail, often
referring to expert opinion. "Wrong, wrong, wrong, Åkesson" was the
headline to such an analysis in Aftonbladet the next day.
The trouble is, not all of Åkesson's arguments WERE entirely wrong - or,
rather, they were not provably wrong, or they were just not considered
terribly important by the experts. For example, Åkesson's reference to
"Swedish artists who criticise or mock Islam [who live] under constant
death threats" was dismissed in Svenska Dagbladet on Wednesday by one of
those experts, a retired professor of history. "A very large number of
death threats have occurred during the last four years that don't have
anything at all to do with Islam," he pointed out, as if that made such
threats entirely trivial. Åkesson's references to sharia-law advocates
and segregated school-swimming lessons were treated in a similar fashion.
Thus, Åkesson's list was doubly provocative. First, its accusations -
vague and selective enough to be criticised, but not always demonstrably
false - cunningly persuaded Swedish newspapers to devote a lot of space
to him and his party, which doubtless delighted them.
It also illustrated the huge difficulty that the Swedish media - at
least beyond some cautious leader-columns - and mainstream politicians
have with the issues of immigration and ethnic integration. Whereas the
debate in Denmark appears almost unable to discuss anything else, in
Sweden there seems sometimes to be a blanket denial that immigration and
cultural diversity have brought any problems whatsoever. Dagens
Nyheter's reporting about, in particular, crime and violence in
immigrant-dominated Swedish suburbs contorts itself almost comically to
avoid mentioning explicitly any ethnic component.
This sort of broad, consensual support for "thinking right" (to
paraphrase one of Uppsala University's mottos) in Sweden has probably
contributed to the far right being much weaker here than it has been in
many other Scandinavian and European countries. But, at some point, it
seems plausible that a reluctance to discuss issues in a more complex
way, to "think freely", becomes politically counter-productive. That
point might just have been passed in both Britain and Sweden.
Of course, one major difference between the two countries is that
whereas the BNP have no chance of winning any seats in the national
election next year, the Sweden Democrats might. What's more, if they did
so, there is every chance that they would deprive both the left and
right blocs of a majority, and thus hold the balance of power.
Last week, the government parties were already musing about such a
scenario. Their idea is to tempt the Greens out of their red-green
alliance to secure a majority-based centre-right government. The Greens
responded with hints that, instead, the Centre or Liberal parties should
defect from their Alliance and support a centre-left government. Dagens
Nyheter proposed yesterday that each bloc should agree that the other
should form a government if it wins more seats. That would keep the
Sweden Democrats out of the government-formation process, but it might
not do much for parliamentary stability over the rest of the parliament.
Nick Aylott.
--
Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Stockholm
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se/statsvetenskap
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