In 1994, 15-year-old Jimmie Åkersson sought out a neo-Nazi party. Today, he’s brought that party into the mainstream. In disturbing results, the Swedish parliamentary elections on 11 September have given the far-right Sweden Democrats, which Åkersson has led since 2005, more than 20 percent of the vote. The party is now the second most popular in the country, and holds more seats than any other party.
The Victorian Labor government—which purports to be the most progressive in the country—oversees an increasingly punitive criminal justice system in which cops are handed money and powers with reckless abandon.
Sweden kept businesses, bars, restaurants, most schools and sports venues open for more than a year after first registering a coronavirus case in January 2020. State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell explained—in a now removed article in Dagens Industri, a Stockholm-based financial newspaper—that the country’s strategy to contain the virus would not “compromise our social functioning in a way that is more detrimental to any profits”.
This October, during a recession and lockdown, Victorians will vote in local council elections–the last before new laws will make it almost impossible to elect minor party candidates. Thanks to a massive volunteer-driven campaign, voters will have a chance to reject the status quo and to vote for socialist candidates throughout the northern and western suburbs.
In the 1970s, Sweden’s main trade union federation and the social democratic party toyed with a “wage-earner funds plan”, sometimes called the Meidner Plan after one of its architects, the economist Rudolf Meidner. Many view the plan as a tragically untested experiment that could have turned Sweden into a socialist country.