Perching on a lake shore 120 miles west of Stockholm, the village of Frovi has always enjoyed a reputation as a friendly, welcoming place. Yet on a visit to the supermarket recently, Lena Stragnemyr, a teacher, suffered an upsetting experience.
A neighbour pointed to a group of Syrian refugees in the aisle and said, with a bitter laugh:
“Look, there are your foreign friends.”
Then came the insulting messages on social media. Stragnemyr, who volunteers in a local migrant shelter, found other villagers were avoiding her. “Something has changed in Frovi,” she said last week. “It’s not the Sweden we knew.”
For decades, Sweden has prided itself as the world’s most generous refugee sanctuary. Not any more. The biggest migration wave since the Second World War has washed away its fabled tolerance of foreigners amid fears the sacred welfare model is buckling under the burden.
Sweden has in effect bolted its door to migrants and is restricting benefits for those it has sheltered, after a wave of violence linked to migrants.
What makes the clampdown all the more extraordinary is that it is not the work of nationalists of the far-right but of a liberal coalition of social democrats and Greens under Stefan Lofven, a former welder and trade unionist who became prime minister in 2014.
“We realised that Sweden had been a bit naive in the past,” said Asa Romson, a leading Green who served as Lofven’s deputy prime minister and appeared in tears at a press conference with him last November to announce the reintroduction of border controls for the first time since 1954. “It was very difficult for us. It has affected how we look at ourselves.”
For some in Stockholm, the border controls and more recent measures to make the country less attractive to migrants are symptoms of a revolution marking the end of the country’s reign as a “humanitarian superpower”.
“We’re abandoning the old narrative of us Swedes being a tolerant, open-hearted, multicultural society,” said Andreas Heino, author of books on the national ethos. “We’re fumbling for something new.”
For others, the Nordic state has turned nasty. “Suddenly people think it’s OK to be against taking in refugees,” said Isabell Ramberg, deacon of Frovi’s Lutheran church.
Stickers with the words “Enough is enough” and “Send them home” have appeared recently on the door of the social centre Ramberg runs for the dozens of migrants sheltering in a former prison on the edge of the village.
The speed and extent of the policy changes, including tougher measures to enforce the deportation of those whose asylum applications are rejected, has evoked comparisons to a revolution.
“Only a few months ago you would have been crucified as a racist for daring to suggest that Sweden could not cope with the refugee influx,” said Karin Svanborg-Sjovall of Timbro, a Stockholm think tank.
“Now all of our politicians are trying to outdo themselves in coming up with policies to curb the migrant inflow.”
The rightward lurch followed Sweden’s admission last year of nearly 163,000 migrants which, relative to its 10m population, is more than were taken in by any other EU country, Germany included.
An ugly sequence of events since then has turned on its head the country’s image of itself as a tranquil, multicultural haven.
A British boy, Yuusuf Warsame, died in a grenade attack while visiting relatives. A four-year-old girl was killed in a car bombing in Gothenburg over the summer. Both were hapless victims of the growing violence of immigrant gangs, according to police. Just as shocking were the murder of a volunteer caring for refugees, allegedly by one of her charges, and reports that police covered up complaints from several women of being raped and groped by Muslim men at a summer concert.
A debate about “Swedish values” has begun, a topic once such a taboo that it was seen as racist even to suggest they existed.
The government insists the reintroduction of border controls is temporary — after a three-year “break” for “capacity-building”, Sweden will revert to the noble humanitarian doctrine dating back to the war, when it sheltered Danish Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Yet those who hold up Sweden as a humanitarian example for the rest of the world fear that the about-turn will encourage other EU countries to follow suit.
“I’m stupefied by this policy shift,” said Anna Carlstedt, head of Sweden’s Red Cross, who compared the changing climate to the wave of 1930s nationalism in Germany that brought Adolf Hitler to power. “Europe will just say, ‘If Sweden is decreasing its aid then it’s OK for us to do it, too’.”
In the modernistic Riksdag, or parliament building, Markus Wiechel, 28, an MP for the far-right Sweden Democrats, can scarcely contain his glee at the change of mood.
“When I joined the party a few years ago it was impossible to talk about migrant issues without being accused of racism,” he said. “I got attacked by left-wing extremists, I got spat at. I was dancing in a nightclub when a man tried to strangle me.”
Now, Wiechel says, other parties “are adopting our policies, saying the things we’ve been saying for years”. He does not argue with the idea of helping foreigners but insists: “We cannot afford good healthcare for everyone. Standards have gone down.”
Liberal politicians agree that refugee spending — on track to surpass that for defence for the first time this year — cannot be sustained without trimming the welfare system, described by Svanborg-Sjovall as the “holy of holies”, or reducing the number of refugees.
The latter idea finds resonance among some in Frovi.
“There are too many refugees,” said an elderly man in the supermarket.
“They should be sent home,” growled a heavily tattooed biker outside.
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Originally Posted by Josuke
"It doesn't matter if you believe me or not but common sense doesn't really work here. You're mad, I'm mad. We're all MAD here."
