The country is known for its majestic landscapes, its smoked salmon and its proverbial tolerance. But this image of Epinal is flayed today. Last month, Sweden indeed experienced major riots. Throughout the Easter weekend, hundreds of young people from the country’s Islamized suburbs gathered to attack the police, terrorize the population, set fire to cars and loot. In Malmö, a school was burnt down. The damage amounted to several million dollars, not to mention the hundred or so police officers injured.
The trigger for these riots is called Rasmus Paludan, a professional provocateur who leads an ultra-nationalist Danish party and who wanders around northern Europe burning copies of the Koran. The gesture may be immeasurably stupid, there is nothing illegal about it, since the offense of blasphemy was abolished in Sweden in 1970.
This demagogue is however only the tree which hides the forest. If he was the trigger for these riots, he is not the cause. It is clear that, as in France, such riots are repeated today regularly in Sweden without the intervention of such a crank being necessary. Social Democrat Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson described the riots as a gesture that had “nothing political about it”, but rather represented an “attack on democracy”.
The evolution of this small northern country which has many points in common with Quebec should interest us. As early as the 1960s, René Lévesque saw it as an example of an egalitarian society that had found a judicious balance between the welfare state and economic liberalism. Not only is the population of Sweden comparable in number to ours, but, as in Quebec, Swedish society tends to favor consensus rather than major confrontations.
For a long time, this northern kingdom with a homogeneous population did not experience much immigration. It was even a country of emigration, a bit like Quebec, which, at the end of the 19and, undergoes a veritable exodus to the United States. Between 1985 and 2022, according to Tino Sanandaji, a researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics Research Institute, the share of the population that is non-Western rose from 2% to 20%. Throughout the early 2000s, Sweden even prided itself on being a “moral superpower”, the most welcoming country in Europe for refugees. More “open to the world”, you die!
At that time, the media explained that the country had no choice but to open up to immigration if it wanted to preserve its social system. Until the failures of integration begin to appear in broad daylight. For two decades, this population, mainly of Lutheran faith or culture, has discovered with amazement the cultural, political and civilizational shock caused by massive immigration from countries with neither the same culture nor the same values.
If immigration continued at the pace of the past decade, 31% of the population would be Muslim by 2050, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. However, thanks to the demographic upheavals that have occurred in Sweden over the past 30 years, crime has increased exponentially. In 2020, it was estimated that 32 of the country’s most wanted criminal ringleaders were of immigrant background.
Anxious not to “play the game” of the Democratic Party of Sweden, a populist party radically opposed to immigration, the press will describe the great riots of 2005 in the French suburbs as a typically hexagonal exotic phenomenon. Yet the same causes create the same effects. A few years later, similar riots broke out on the outskirts of Malmö (2009) and Stockholm (2013). For 20 years, the country has seen the multiplication of these so-called “social exclusion” zones. Areas that are gradually becoming lawless areas.
If the Swedish example should interest us, it is also because, unlike France and Quebec, the political world has had the courage to look this reality in the face. It took three decades for the Swedish elites to realize that there are objective thresholds for welcoming populations who, for multiple reasons related to culture and numbers, do not integrate. Or who will only do so after several generations. Even on the left, immigration is no longer considered the quasi-religious taboo that it always is in Quebec. Emerging from the sole moral diktat, it has once again become a political subject over which popular sovereignty can and must be exercised.
After decades of denial, the ruling Social Democratic Party has finally surrendered to the will of the majority. In 2020, it limited entries to 21,000 and drastically restricted the right to asylum. On April 28, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson publicly acknowledged that integration was a failure “which has given rise to parallel societies and gang violence”. An opinion shared for decades by a majority of Swedes, but which was silenced for fear of seeing accusations of racism fall on it.
In Sweden, reality has finally reasserted itself against the moral ostracism that threatens those who dare to ask the slightest question about immigration. It’s never too late to face reality.