Is Sweden’s Bulwark Against Nazism Facing the Same Fate as the Berlin Wall?

The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has won 44 percent of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, Björn Wiman writes, asking whether Germany’s “bulwark against Nazism” is heading toward the same fate as the Berlin Wall.

He says that in another era, the result would have triggered a major crisis for Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson and destroyed, for a long time, the idea that the party could enter a Swedish government. He draws a similar conclusion from a report by the magazine Expo last week that a Sweden Democrats parliamentary employee had spread pro-Russian narratives and Russian state propaganda for a decade.

The employee lives with Gustav Gellerbrant, head of the Sweden Democrats’ coordination office, Wiman writes. He argues that this revelation, too, would once have caused a severe political crisis for Åkesson and ended thoughts of the Sweden Democrats joining a government. “Now it is not such a time,” he writes.

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A living democracy where racist ideas and organisations have no influence.

For that reason, Wiman says, it is reassuring that Swedish society still rests on institutions that take their mission seriously. He singles out Expo, whose chief executive and publisher Daniel Poohl described its purpose at the magazine’s 30th anniversary last year: “A living democracy where racist ideas and organisations have no influence.”

Wiman endorses that goal, writing that it is “no foolish idea at all.” Only a few decades ago, he says, it would have seemed completely self-evident.

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No foolish idea at all.