The Sweden Democrats (SD) on Thursday, June 26th, released a white paper—an official report investigating the party’s history and controversial origins from its inception in 1998, including its roots in antisemitic and white supremacist circles.
Critics and mainstream media continue to accuse SD of not doing enough to confront their past, despite the party now being a strong supporter of Israel. After the October 7th Hamas terror attacks, SD’s foreign policy spokesperson Aron Emilsson wrote in an op-ed that “for the Sweden Democrats, support for Israel’s military operations against the terrorist group Hamas is a matter of course.” The party also supported the deportation of non-citizens celebrating the massacre. Today, SD, which consistently polls at around 20%, has clear boundaries against antisemitism and has—more thoroughly than any other Swedish political party—expelled racist and antisemitic members from its rolls.
Other parties would do well to do some housecleaning and apologize for their own historical wrongdoings. The Left Party still accepts antisemitic members of parliament and has a history of questionable contacts with the totalitarian Soviet Union. And the Social Democrats, who governed the country uninterrupted for 44 years, until recently had an unapologetic antisemite with ties to Hamas as an MP, and were also responsible for a program of forced sterilizations that remained in place into the 1970s.
The SD white paper comes the day after party chair Jimmie Åkesson, in a speech at the traditional Almedalsveckan gathering of Swedish politicians and pundits, issued a public apology to Swedish Jews targeted by the earlier movement’s antisemitism:
The white paper is a reckoning with what took place during the party’s early years, and I deeply regret it. I offer my sincerest apologies, both personally and on behalf of the Sweden Democrats, that there was a time when my party harbored individuals with antisemitic beliefs.
“My party was founded in a very bad way by people with reprehensible views,” Mattias Karlsson, part of the party leadership, said.
The white paper, written by intellectual historian Tony Gustafsson and commissioned by the Sweden Democrats, comprises close to 900 pages and documents how the now-democratic party emerged from an anti-democratic movement. At least eleven of its founding members were part of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groupings, including ‘Keep Sweden Swedish,’ a violence-prone movement started in the 1970s with the goal of limiting immigration.
Among the Sweden Democrats’ candidates in the 1994 election, Gustafsson said, many were also members of groups such as the Nordic Reich Party—a minor Nazi party started in the 1950s and, at its largest, having a membership roll of about 1,000 people—and White Aryan Resistance, patterned on the American white supremacist organization by the same name.
“Over three fairly intense years, [the Sweden Democrats] engaged in setting boundaries against the anti-democratic elements within the party,” Gustafsson said.
Mattias Karlsson, who joined the Sweden Democrats in 1999, told Dagens Nyheter that, at that time, the party had started to reform and was organizationally, in terms of personnel, and ideologically on the path to coming to terms with its past.
Swedish media, which has consistently been quick to refer back to the party’s sordid roots, even now question why “only the Jews” got a public apology from Åkesson—and not (quoting Dagens Nyheter) “homosexuals and black Africans.” Karlsson said he had no problem apologizing to anyone who has “felt threatened” and continued:
The reason we have specifically highlighted Swedish citizens of Jewish descent is because antisemitism remains an acute threat even today, and the atrocities that the Jewish people have endured stand out.
Jewish Central Council Chairman Aron Verständig told state broadcaster SVT that it’s a positive sign that the white paper accounts for the party’s antisemitic legacy and includes an apology for it. “What we see here is that the Sweden Democrats have taken important steps, and now all parties must take responsibility for antisemitism within their own ranks.”