The speech by the leader of the Swedish far-right, the Nordic country’s second-largest party and parliamentary partner of the center-right government, at the party’s national days this Sunday could not be more inappropriate. Amid a crisis in the Middle East and without completing Sweden’s accession to NATO, Jimmie Akessonargued for the right to demolish mosques as “it is not a right to come to our country and erect monuments to a foreign and imperialist ideology.”
The leader of the Swedish Democrats (SD) took his Islamophobic speech a step further by asserting that “we must start confiscating and destroying mosques where anti-democratic, anti-Swedish, homophobic, anti-Semitic propaganda or general disinformation is being spread .”
The Swedish Prime Minister, the conservative Ulf Kristersson, quickly spoke up and reminded Åkesson that “we don’t demolish places of worship in Sweden,” he says. “As a society, we must combat violent extremism, regardless of its motives, but we will do so within the framework of a democratic state and the rule of law,” Kristersson stressed.
In his opinion, the SD leader should “come to his senses and think that we are living in a dangerous time,” referring to the terrorist threat that the country is facing after the attack in Brussels in which two fans of the national team died . Football. “It gives a false image of what Sweden represents internationally and forces the Foreign Ministry to correct the image of what Sweden is,” the Prime Minister stressed.
Kristersson himself was forced to make a statement on X, formerly Twitter, reaffirming Sweden’s “constitutional right to religious freedom.”
Sweden, whose NATO membership application still needs to be ratified by Muslim-majority Hungary and Turkey, has experienced a series of incidents that have raised tensions with countries across the Middle East.
A series of Koran burnings earlier this year sparked widespread protests and condemnation against Sweden, and several Muslim countries summoned Swedish diplomatic representatives. Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July, setting fire to the premises in the second incident.
Last year, Sweden was the target of a large-scale disinformation campaign claiming its social services had been affected “Abduction of Muslim children” and housing them in Christian homes, forcing authorities to publicly deny the allegations.
In his speech, Åkesson also called for Muslim attributes of the cityscape, such as minarets, domes and crescents, to be completely removed.
Accordingly Victoria Enkvist, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at Uppsala University, there is currently no legal support for removing various forms of symbols and expressions because they may be related to a religion. “The introduction of restrictions on a particular religion constitutes discrimination under both the Constitution and the European Convention,” he explains.
The Sweden Democrats also want the security police (SAPO) to be given the opportunity to intercept mosques as a preventive measure. According to Enkvist, “There is currently no legal basis for listening in on conversations just because they take place in a mosque. It is also not possible to enact such a law when it comes to protecting freedoms and rights,” writes Victoria Enkvist.
From the opposition, the former Social Democratic Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson He called on Kristersson to dismiss all SD members working in the government. “This worsens Sweden’s image, does not facilitate our membership in NATO and further increases polarization in our country. This does not mean that Sweden and the safety of the Swedish people come first,” Andersson wrote in his X-Profile.
But criticism also came from the Liberals, the junior partner of the center-right three-party party and undoubtedly the most hesitant to rely on the far right to govern since the September 2021 elections. Jan Jönsson, councilor for social citizenship of Stockholm, sharply criticized Åkesson’s statement, calling the proposal “unconstitutional” and “Islamophobic”.
According to Jönsson, in order for cooperation between partners to continue, the government must find ways to prevent this type of “very extreme proposals” from SD from continuing to arrive. Jönsson emphasizes that it is “completely unthinkable” that the Liberals would vote for it. “And I don’t think that the SD has the opportunity to make such proposals within the framework of government cooperation,” he concludes.