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Europe

Sweden Democrats apologize for past Nazi links, antisemitism as election nears

2025-06-27

[IsraelTimes] Party, which established ties with Israel’s government earlier this year, hopes to join a future coalition government after the 2026 vote

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats

...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy, white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
apologized on Thursday for the party’s past Nazi links and antisemitism, part of efforts to present a more moderate, mainstream image to voters ahead of a national election next year.

Good for them. Good luck in the next election, guys.

The Sweden Democrats were presenting the results of a specially commissioned study that found Nazi and antisemitic views to have been common at party functions and in its printed materials in the 1980s and 1990s.

"That there have been clear expressions of antisemitism and support for National Socialist ideas in my party’s history I think is disgusting and reprehensible," Mattias Karlsson, a member of parliament often described as the party’s chief ideologist, told a news conference.

"I would like to reiterate the party’s apology, above all to Swedish citizens of Jewish descent who may have felt a strong sense of insecurity and fear for good reasons."

The commissioning of the study sought to acknowledge and break with a past that has long hindered its cooperation with Sweden’s mainstream political parties. The Sweden Democrats hope to join a future coalition government after the 2026 election.

The study also follows a decision by Israel’s Foreign Ministry in February to establish ties with the party, along with two other far-right parties in La Belle France and Spain. That decision followed an assessment of the parties’ policies on Israel, relationship to their local Jewish communities and whether they had reckoned with past antisemitism.

The decision did not indicate an endorsement of every part of their respective platforms, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said at the time.

"The connection will be like with any other political party," Sa’ar told a group of Jewish and pro-Israel leaders in Brussels in February. "After I reviewed the matter and heard the opinion at a professional level — I didn’t see a reason not to do so. The opposite."

Though it was established in 1988, the Sweden Democrats party first entered parliament in 2010 and currently supports Sweden’s right-wing coalition government but has no members in the cabinet.

Tony Gustafsson, the historian hired by the party to write the book, said the party had emerged in the 1980s out of neo-Nazi
...adherents of a philosophy that was seen even at the time as pure evil, which makes them either consciously purely evil, or attention-seeking ratbags. Pick one, or both....
and white supremacist organizations and that it had continued to cooperate with them into the 1990s.

"The collaboration seems to have involved using these groups to help distribute election materials," Gustafsson said, adding there were strong indications that one such group, the "White Aryan Resistance®," had served as security guards at party gatherings.

Gustafsson said there had been a clear connection to Nazism until 1995, the year that current party leader Jimmie Akesson joined the Sweden Democrats, but that the Sweden Democrats had begun distancing itself from such links thereafter.

The party has also confronted more recent accusations of antisemitism. In 2022, a Sweden Democrats official was suspended for calling Anne Frank, the teenage diarist and Holocaust victim, "immoral." In 2018, a party leader unsuccessfully proposed a ban on nonmedical circumcision of boys, calling it "backward."

Posted by:trailing wife

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