Stockholm, Sweden – When Neira Tokalija, a 39-year-old therapist, saw the slogans of Sweden’s far-right party plastered wall-to-wall across Stockholm Central Station, she felt a familiar sense of fear. As a child, Tokalija had fled Bosnia and Herzegovina with her family after ethnic cleansing campaigns targeting Bosniaks. After seeing dozens of campaign posters and installations across Central Station by the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party with neo-Nazi roots, “it made me feel like it doesn’t matter how much I try as a second-generation immigrant; I’ll never be Swedish enough”, she said.
SD had spent about $100,000 on the station campaign with posters that read “If you commit crimes, live off benefits, don’t learn Swedish or misbehave, you’re not welcome”. The campaign came weeks before Sweden’s general election on September 13. The SD, which is polling second, could enter government for the first time if the right-wing bloc wins.
The tone of the campaign’s messaging, which ran for one week in mid-August, Tokalija said, evoked a deep historical trauma. SD also ran several separate campaigns across various Swedish transport networks. In western Sweden, the party ran provocative advertisements on buses that read: “Do you miss Mogadishu?
The repatriation grant will help you get home.” The grant, which has been around since the 1980s and was introduced by a Social Democratic government, offered refugees about $1,000 to resettle in their country of origin. But this year the centre-right coalition government, working with SD, introduced an increase to approximately $36,000 per adult. About 20 bus drivers with roots in Somalia called in sick in protest.
The public transport operator Vasttrafik removed the posters after the protest, stating that the drivers had been afraid of harassment, and citing risk to the working environment and vandalism. Zina al-Dewany, a political commentator and editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, told Al Jazeera the plan was to shock. SD often runs campaigns designed to “provoke a bit too much”, but when they are forced to take them down, the party says it is the “victim”, she said.
After the bus campaign was removed, SD MP Tobias Andersson issued a statement, saying the decision constituted censorship and “election sabotage”. For decades, Sweden’s political establishment had treated SD as a political pariah. But after the 2018 general election, a political deadlock prompted right-wing parties to rethink their alliances.
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