תגית: Populism

The Swedish Left Party’s letters reveal what amateurs they are

The first objection to Swedish MPs sending romantic letters of solidarity to people convicted of murder and terrorism is, of course, a moral one. The second concerns poor judgment. But the third is about something else: amateurism, writes Israeli journalist David Stavrou.

Published in Swedish in Kvartal: V:s brev avslöjar vilka amatörer de är – Kvartal

In the space of just a few days, journalists Sofie Löwenmark, Nathalie Rothschild and Inas Hamdan published investigations showing how members of the Swedish parliament had sent letters of solidarity to Palestinian prisoners convicted of very serious terrorism offenses and had participated in an organized campaign in which several of the recipients are serving life sentences for attacks against civilians.

In 2023, SVT revealed that aid money from the Left Party’s international organization had gone to a project with links to the DFLP, an organization that participated in the October 7 massacre. The following year, prominent Left Party figure Kristofer Lundberg was expelled after expressing support for the terrorist-designated PFLP. In Malmö, Orwa Kadoura left the party following criticism over antisemitic messages. In 2025, MP Lorena Delgado Varas shared a classic antisemitic conspiracy image, and as recently as June this year, the Left Party removed a large number of candidates who had praised Hamas’s October 7 attack, spread Holocaust denial and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories.

All of this is, of course, serious. By now, it is clear that the Left Party has a problem with romanticizing terrorism and spreading antisemitism and conspiracy theories. This can no longer be dismissed as anecdotal. Every time you think rock bottom has been reached, another investigation appears with new revelations. But precisely for that reason, it is almost no longer interesting to discuss this as a question of values. Left Party members are free to believe whatever they want. The truly interesting issue is something else.

Politics is not merely an ideological arena. Politics is a profession. There are laws, practices, institutions and rules of the game. And then there is what in British politics is sometimes described as simply not done – things that may not actually be prohibited but that politicians nevertheless know not to do. It is like any other profession. Surgeons do not operate on gut feeling. Judges do not rule according to whom they instinctively like best. Even a passionate politician is expected to be able to control that passion long enough to do the job.

The first objection to Swedish MPs sending romantic letters of solidarity to people convicted of murder and terrorism is, of course, a moral one. The second concerns poor judgment. But the third is about something else: amateurism.

The Left Party’s explanation in the latest affair illustrates the problem. The party secretary has said that the names came from the Palestinian Association of Sweden and that the Left Party carried out no checks of its own. “There had been a mistake in the fact-checking,” MP Ilona Szatmári Waldau wrote. Nooshi Dadgostar has repeatedly resorted to variations of the same defense during the scandals of recent years. In June, she referred to the large number of Left Party representatives – more than 4,000 – and stressed that those exposed represented only a small proportion. She then said that “there are occasions when people turn up whom you haven’t kept track of.” She promised to tighten the party’s procedures, but that is clearly an almost impossible task, since many other Left Party members defend people who have expressed support for terrorist organizations.

If a blue-haired 17-year-old activist sends a love letter to an ideologically motivated murderer he saw on TikTok, perhaps he can get away with shrugging his shoulders or shouting along with Rage Against the Machine: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” But members of parliament are not teenagers. They are adults, and adults are expected to evaluate their sources critically and ask questions. What does it look like when we become fixated on prisoners from a single international conflict while ignoring others? What diplomatic, trade-policy and security-policy consequences could our statements have? Which people and organizations are we legitimizing?

Is that boring? Does it involve compromise? Perhaps even moral coruption? Perhaps – if you live in a syndicalist collective, eat out of tin cans beneath posters of “freedom fighters” and say that “when the forest is felled, the chips will fly”. But the Left Party’s MPs are well-paid public officials who participate in – and enjoy all the privileges and perks that come with – professional politics.

That means it is part of the job to investigate the people and organizations you cooperate with, read court judgments, speak to embassies, diplomats, experts and lawyers, ask what is disputed and what has been established, and understand the consequences of your own symbolic politics. For example, when a professional politician becomes involved in another country’s prison system by writing a letter, they must understand how the people they are writing to are perceived by their victims, as well as understand another society’s sensitivities and collective trauma.

To a Swede, Ahmad al-Moghrabi or Ibrahim Abu Mokh may be unfamiliar names on a list of “Palestinian prisoners.” To an Israeli, those same names may signify deadly suicide attacks against civilians, murdered children or a young conscript who was kidnapped on his way home and never returned. You do not have to accept Israel’s policies in the West Bank or agree with the Israeli courts. You only need to be able to imagine the reverse situation. Imagine if foreign parliamentarians wrote to Jackie Arklöv and praised his “courage and perseverance” without checking the judgment against him. The first Swedish response wouldn't be a complex debate about Scandinavian geo-politics, it would be: Have you even bothered to find out who this person is?

This kind of disregard for the rules of politics – in which passionate conviction is allowed to cloud judgment and consequences and basic due diligence are ignored – has a name. It is called populism.

For many years, the Sweden Democrats have struggled with a similar transition – from a protest movement to a party with influence over the state. As part of that process, the party has run internal training programs under the title The Road to Power (Vägen till makten), although there is, of course, no reason to romanticize the results. SD continues to be plagued by recurring scandals. A training course cannot magically erase a political culture.

And this is where the parallel with the Left Party becomes even more uncomfortable. V has already tried the educational route. Following several antisemitism scandals, in the spring of 2025 the party invited its members to a two-hour training session on antisemitism. Every member received an invitation. Yet one year later, the party found itself with 25 candidates removed from its lists following revelations involving, among other things, precisely antisemitism. As the Swedish elections draw closer, the party is finding it increasingly difficult to convince voters that sympathy for terrorists, conspiracy theories and antisemitism among its politicians and activists is a bug. In its case, it seems much more like a feature.


Europe’s New Right Is Deluded. The Continent’s Fate Is Up to the Left

At the end of the 1940s, while Europe was putting ‘never again’ into a work plan, a parallel movement was arising. What began in obscure realms now characterizes the far-right renaissance in Europe

published in "Haaretz": https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2022-10-13/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/europes-new-right-is-deluded-the-continents-fate-is-up-to-the-left/00000183-d2d9-def3-a9a3-f3d90c1c0000

In the years following World War II, the words “never again” were a key to understanding political and social events in Europe. Shortly after the war, senior Nazi war criminals were tried in Nuremberg, and the United Nations was founded to safeguard the peace and security of the world. Then in 1948 the United States launched the Marshall Plan, with the aim of rehabilitating the Continent and setting it on a path of growth. One of the first treaties adopted by the UN was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a term coined by the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who was one of the convention’s initiators. Thanks to these developments, by the end of the decade, the term “never again” had become more than a moral imperative: It was a work plan.

But concurrently, a parallel historical movement was rising, one that attracted less public attention. In the shadow of the new and free Europe, a united front began to coalesce; it aimed to restore Nazi and fascist values and ideas to dominant roles. A few years after the mass murders ended, an increasing number of movements and parties that bore the racist, nationalist and antidemocratic heritage that was vanquished in 1945 cropped up across the Continent.

It began in obscure realms, far from the eyes of the international institutions and the press. The Swedish historian Elisabeth Åsbrink describes the process in her 2016 book “1947: Where Now Begins.” She notes that Per Engdahl, the leader of the Swedish fascist movement who had been active during the war, began connecting nationalists from across the Continent – those from the losing side in the war. He brought Nazi war criminals to safe haven in Sweden and from there smuggled them around the world. Conferences that were public knowledge were held, working plans were written and parties were founded in many European countries. This is how the English fascist Oswald Mosley could be linked both ideologically and organizationally via the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the heir to Mussolini’s path, to the neo-Nazis in Scandinavia and the Low Countries and to the last of Hitler’s loyalists in Germany.

That unity did not last long. Ideological differences – questions of race, culture and nationalism – arose quickly, and were compounded by personal power struggles. The trans-European parent movement was gradually dissolved, and its branches in the various countries split into movements and parties of two main types: Some became violent, revolutionary fringe groups, while others strove to draw close to the mainstream.

In Sweden, which had been neutral during the war, thus evading the devastation caused by the fighting, a large number of neo-Nazi movements would emerge in the decades to come – from the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSAP) in the 1940s during the war to Keep Sweden Swedish in the 1980s. In Italy, the MSI went through several incarnations before morphing into the National Alliance, in the 1990s. In 1954 France saw the establishment of the Rassemblement National Français by Maurice Bardèche, who was close to Engdahl, and Jean Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who had served in the Vichy regime. It’s these same three countries that now embody the far-right renaissance in Europe.

In 1988, members of the Swedish neo-Nazi scene founded the Sweden Democrats. One of its key figures was Gustaf Ekström, then 81, a former Swedish volunteer in the Waffen SS who had also been active in the NSAP. Ekstrom died in 1995, but his party is still around, and it crossed the electoral threshold for the first time in 2010. In last month’s parliamentary election, it became the country’s second-largest party, garnering more than 20 percent of the vote. Sweden’s next government will be wholly dependent on it.

While the Sweden Democrats were slowly and cautiously consolidating their strength, in 1992 a 15-year-old girl named Giorgia Meloni joined the youth movement of Italy’s the neo-fascist party, the MSI. She rose through the ranks of the party, which eventually became the Brothers of Italy (FdI), which in September won Italy’s parliamentary election. Meloni will be the next prime minister of Italy, borne on the wings of a party whose emblem makes use of the tricolor flame, the old Italian fascist symbol.l

In last April’s runoff presidential election in France, Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent and the centrist candidate, was victorious; but the losing candidate Marine Le Pen, received 41.45 percent of the vote, a personal high. Le Pen’s roots were planted in the same fascist ground that had been plowed originally by Per Engdahl. The European far right’s renewal movement in the 1950s had a monthly journal, Nation Europa, which was founded by a former SS officer, Arthur Ehrhardt. Among its writers were thinkers who became the living spirit of the new European right. One of them was a young Frenchman campaigning for the Comité National Français: Jean-Marie Le Pen.

His daughter’s party, recently renamed the National Rally, is similar to the Sweden Democrats and to Meloni’s party. The three, which represent the success of the far right’s postwar evolution, vehemently insist they are not fascists. They take pride in their conservatism and in encouraging “traditional family values”; they think that feminism, LGBTQ rights and access to abortion – not to mention immigration – have gone too far. Independent and activist courts, a free and unbiased media, and academia are also not their cup of tea. But publicly, they shake off accusations of racism and authoritarian tendencies.

It may well be that the great problem with these parties may not be their extremism, antisemitism and xenophobia, but the lack of seriousness of those who wish to lead the Continent (and are poised to do so in no few countries). A major contention against the left is that it is naïve and unrealistic, even dreamy. But in today’s Europe, it is the populist right that is afflicted with these childhood ailments: disconnected from reality, delusionary, unpragmatic and fickle in its views. At times its leaders draw close to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, then it suddenly supports NATO. It views the European Union as the root of all evil but when in power happily accepts astronomical checks from it. This isn’t necessarily extremism, it’s populism that avoids responsible long-term solutions while fueling well-organized crusades against so-called corrupt elites.

This childish, look-the-other-way behavior is most blatant in the far right’s denial of the climate crisis, in the face of an absolute scientific consensus. For these parties and the leaders they spawned, the approaching consequences and the existential crisis that humanity is facing are akin to fairy tales, and they oppose almost all the measures being proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Riding an ostrich

But it’s not just global warming, the droughts or the rising sea levels. The populist right closes its eyes to the realities of the waves of immigration, the refugee crisis and the wars of the future. While the left and the conservative right suggest solutions – some better, some less so – the populist right believes that if it ignores the problem, it will simply go away. As far as it’s concerned, it’s possible to build a wall around the Continent and explain the world using a variety of alternative sources, from Fox News to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

On the one hand, they are against taking in refugees, but they are also opposed to offering economic aid to the countries in Africa and the Middle East where the migrants come from. Similarly, it’s out of the question to invest in international institutions and conflict resolution. The flow of immigrants westward and northward, which could total tens of millions, will simply end by itself. It is sometimes said that cooperating with these far-right parties is like riding a tiger, but in reality it’s more like riding an ostrich.

The answer to the question of where all of this is leading, and whether the Europe of the future will be a conservative, insular continent that has regressed in regard to human rights, immigrant absorption and coping with the challenges facing humanity, actually rests with the left. Today, both in Europe and the United States, the left is adapting to its right-wing rivals. Populism is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon; both sides are adept at deconstructing themselves and putting forward a garland of specific struggles that are divided according to race, sex, gender and age, instead of coming up with solutions that are intended for society as a whole.

Social Democratic parties still advocate traditional solutions such as crafting full-employment policies, strengthening trade unions, investing in welfare and providing public housing and a strong social safety net. But in some countries these parties have given way to the identity politics of the so-called radical left, or to the neoliberal policies of Social Democratic parties that have lost their way. For these kinds of parties, reality is no longer the political arena, it’s the endless chatter on TV and social media. In countries that have lost their traditional left, it’s hard to see who will right the ship that’s sailing toward the populist iceberg.

Predicting the future isn’t easy, but we don’t have to go back many years to remember what happens in Europe when the extreme fringes on the right and left fight for power while the moderates are preoccupied with internal wrangling. While all this is going on, the war in Ukraine is becoming an echo of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, which was the preview for World War II. As the cliché goes, history tends to repeat. The past year looks like the start of a process that may end with the ushering in of a new period – one whose guiding principle may very well once more be “never again.”