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Swedes have become all too familiar with gun violence. But the shooting of a mother and her child at a playground in central Sweden last month has provided an even more shocking and violent backdrop to the country’s parliamentary elections on September 11.
“It’s getting worse and worse in terms of violent crimes. It worries people,” said Torsten Elofsson, a former Malmö police chief who is now a candidate for the centre-right Christian Democrats.
“It used to be just Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö,” he continued, referring to the country’s three big cities. “Now you see it in small towns across Sweden. It’s getting closer and closer to where most people live.”
In the past decade, Sweden has gone from having one of the lowest per capita rates of deadly shootings in Europe to the highest, according to data from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. This year is on track to be a record for fatal shootings with a total of 44 deaths by mid-August, not far off the previous peak of 47 in 2020.
Law and order, once dismissed as a gang-on-gang phenomenon confined to the immigrant-heavy poor suburbs, is among the top priorities for Swedish voters, according to polling companies.
Nicholas Aylott, associate professor at Södertörn University, said he recently read of a 17-year-old shot dead near Stockholm, only to find out the victim was a friend of his son who had visited his home.
“It’s unbelievable, but in a way inevitable. It stops being something you read about in the papers and is something you experience. You couldn’t have a clearer symbol of how Sweden has changed,” he added.
Crime and the shootings have dominated the electoral debate and the itineraries of party leaders.
A playground in Eskilstuna, a town of just over 100,000 people, has become the centre of focus after the shooting there shocked the nation. Swedish police believe the mother and her five-year-old, both injured in the attack, were caught up in the indiscriminate crossfire of an inter-gang dispute.
The child’s father told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper: “How can we live in a place where children risk being shot in a playground? There’s no safety any more.”
The governing Social Democrats, in power for the past eight years, have toughened their rhetoric on law and order and immigration in an attempt to head off fierce criticism from the rightwing opposition.
“This is an attack on all of society, and so all of society must defend itself,” Sweden’s centre-left prime minister Magdalena Andersson said during a visit to Eskilstuna this week.
But it is the nationalist Sweden Democrats who appear to be benefiting from the focus on crime, having long warned that the country’s open immigration policies up until 2015 would lead to growing violence. The rise in shootings has been linked to turf wars between drug gangs founded by immigrants.
The Sweden Democrats are the largest opposition party in opinion polls, with 22 per cent of support versus 17 per cent for the more mainstream Moderates, according to the latest Ipsos numbers. The Social Democrats are the largest party with 28 per cent.
“We’ve had a Social Democrat government for eight years and they’ve promised to crack down on the gangs, but it’s just got worse,” said Jimmie Åkesson, Sweden Democrat leader, as he too visited the playground this week.
In the southern city of Malmö, many of modern Sweden’s dynamics are on display. The city centre is packed with trendy bars and restaurants, attracting an international crowd, many of whom work for start-ups in the city or the nearby Danish capital, Copenhagen.
But it is also the entry point for many immigrants, and home to one of the country’s most notorious suburbs, Rosengård.
Elofsson said he saw the problem years ago as a police officer, looking at the names of those arrested and seeing immigrant names over-represented.
“For many years, we were silenced. It wasn’t taken seriously by politicians or the media,” he said, adding there were growing signs of parallel societies and even local versions of sharia law.
Police in Rosengård have worked with the community and had some successes in reducing shootings in recent years, before the uptick in 2022.
Glen Sjögren, a veteran officer, said politicians’ current focus on tougher punishments and more police was too simple an answer, arguing it was not a problem of law enforcement but an issue for society.
“To give police more resources is not a solution. The whole society has to say this has to stop and we have to do this in a different way from pre-school and up. If we’re going to have immigration as big as we’ve had the past few years, we have to be better at integrating,” he added.
One issue, he said, was that there was a feeling among many Swedes of “as long as it doesn’t happen here”, with most of them never having set foot in any of the immigrant-dominated suburbs.
At the Emporia shopping centre, not far from the bridge that links Malmö and Copenhagen, one woman told the Financial Times that she had “never been to Rosengård, and I hope I never will”. Two days later, a man was shot dead at the same mall.
Andersson has recently changed her tone, warning Sweden should not have Chinatowns, Little Italies or “Somalitowns”. However, the unusually blunt language has upset many in her party who are used to being warmer towards immigrants.
“If we continue with this rhetoric I don’t know that I can carry on in the party,” said one activist in Stockholm, arguing for a need to focus on better welfare and schools for immigrants, and not just be tougher on crime.
But for Elofsson and many rightwing politicians, the situation is urgent. “If your house is burning, you call the fire brigade, you don’t think about how it started. Only when the fire is out can you work on prevention.”
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Swedish PM’s Chinatowns quip at odds with the data / From Kai L Chan, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
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