It all started on Thursday April 14 with the confirmation of Rasmus Paludan’s visit to the coastal town of Linköping (Sweden). This lawyer by training, based in Denmark, has dual Danish and Swedish nationality and leads a party called Stram Kurs, “Hard Line” in French. He intends to stand for legislative elections in Sweden next September. His trademark: burning Korans in public, usually in neighborhoods with a large immigrant population. In recent years, he has been involved in multiple incidents in several European countries, including France, where he was arrested and extradited a year and a half ago.
This time, his visit had been authorized by the Swedish public authorities and Paludan visited several towns in this country of 10 million inhabitants: Linköping, Norköpping, Rinkeby in the suburbs of Stockholm, then Malmö where he burned a Koran in public on Saturday evening April 16. Each time, counter-demonstrations erupted. Calm only returned on the evening of Monday April 18, since Rasmus Paludan left Swedish soil to return to Denmark.
The toll established by the Swedish police amounts to more than 40 injured, including 26 police officers, because the counter-demonstrators, opposed to this far-right activist, first attacked the police . In these neighborhoods with a large Muslim population, it is not so much the provocations of Rasmus Paludan who shock, it is especially the fact that they are authorized by the public authorities. This explains the gear.
The demonstrators, often to cries of “God is great”, attacked the police as the embodiment of power and therefore responsible for allowing Paludan to burn Qurans in public. Swedish police say they were really targeted: “We tried to kill several of us”, underlines the commander of the special operations. Nearly 20 police vehicles were also burned or damaged. And in Norköpping, the police ended up firing warning shots. They in turn injured three people. The police made 40 arrests, including several minors.
These events revive the debate in Sweden on freedom of expression and on the tolerance granted to all forms of opinion, even what may amount to incitement to hatred. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson had to intervene on Monday. She points out that in Sweden, “everyone can express their opinion, whether it is in good or bad taste. And whatever you think, you cannot respond with violence. Because that is exactly what Rasmus Paludan is looking for”.
In the Swedish press, some are still wondering: to what extent freedom of expression should allow offense to beliefs? Several Muslim countries have also expressed their disapproval of these events, which recall, to a lesser extent, the case of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark in 2005. Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have officially protested, denouncing “Islamophobic hate crimes tolerated under the guise of freedom of expression”.