Just over a year ago the Sweden Democrat chairman of the parliamentary justice committee, Richard Jomshof, wrote in a tweet that Swedes were becoming a minority in their own country in the face of ongoing Islamisation.
“These aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re facts,” he said.
When it was put to Sweden Democrat party leader Jimmie Åkesson that his old friend was peddling the inflammatory white nationalist Great Replacement Theory (also known as White Replacement Theory), he said Jomshof "must have meant something else."
“It’s not likely that he means the same thing as Nazis when they talk about replacement. He’s not a Nazi so he must have meant something else," he told Göteborgs-Posten.
When Åkesson himself penned an opinion piece in Expressen this week arguing that Swedes were in fact being replaced, he was quick to say that he’s “not a racist or a conspiracy theorist”.
In a follow-up article he said it was “completely irrelevant” that he happened to be using the same words as “obscure extremist groups”.
As if words didn’t matter.
Sweden has had immigration over the past 30 years on a scale not seen by many other countries, which is the basis of Åkesson's defence. But it's entirely possible to be critical of immigration without using the language of conspiracy theorists.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson was asked by Expressen for a comment. He began by agreeing with parts of Åkesson’s analysis.
“I have long been critical of the large-scale immigration we’ve had in Sweden, bigger than we’ve had the capacity to integrate.”
But did he agree that Swedes were at risk of replacement?
“I’m not going to use that term,” he said.
His coalition colleague, Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch, said she was "not comfortable with that terminology."
That’s not even close to an adequate response.
Replacement theorists in Europe claim that political elites are conspiring to replace white native populations with non-European immigrants, often from Muslim-majority countries.
A Sweden Democrat politician in Gothenburg was recently ejected from her position as a lay judge after claiming that “the left, liberals and globalists” were conspiring to replace Swedes with immigrants.
As two experts on far-right extremism wrote in an LA Times opinion piece, the theory has underpinned some of the worst mass shootings in recent history.
“Since Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, mass murders in the name of white replacement theory (WRT) have become prevalent. Many of these killers, including Breivik; Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter; and Payton Gendron, the suspect in the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., are self-identified as fascists.”
There was once a time (about a year ago) when even Jimmie Åkesson thought twice about weaponising replacement theory.
But after the recent revelations that the Sweden Democrats are running a troll factory from inside their communications department, Swedish politics has entered uncharted territory.
When TV4’s Kalla Fakta aired its exposé, the three government parties that rely on the far right to rule briefly raised their voices.
The rules of political engagement required that the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals at least make a show of a strong response.
But rather than apologising and backtracking in line with accepted norms, the Sweden Democrats went on the attack.
The party would not be shutting down its anonymous accounts, Åkesson said. What’s more, he added, TV4’s investigative report was part of a domestic influence campaign orchestrated by the left-liberal establishment.
Crazy stuff.
The only concession the Sweden Democrats made to the government was a pledge to remove the handful of anonymous social media posts saying mean things about the coalition partners. But the anti-immigrant content? That was allowed to stay.
They would also educate the two staffers who wrote the posts about the clause in their cooperation agreement that says the four parties have to be nice to each other.
The government quickly softened its criticism. But the Sweden Democrats continued to rub their noses in it by celebrating the “graduation” of the offending employees with a party featuring fizzy drinks set against a backdrop of printed images from the TV4 exposé.
The government had two options: stop working with the Sweden Democrats or learn to live with the public humiliation.
There was never any doubt which option they would choose. This is a government that’s terrified of what happens if they end the collaboration with the Sweden Democrats. Will they ever get into power again?
So the Sweden Democrats now effectively have carte blanche to say and do whatever they like, and they've seized on the chance to ramp up the far-right rhetoric in the run-up to the European elections.
Sweden already has a serious problem with far-right extremism, and now immigrants have yet more cause for concern – because as we've seen elsewhere, the normalisation of replacement theory can have terrifying consequences.
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