The Sweden Democrats issued an apology yesterday for the party’s past associations with Nazi and antisemitic tropes. The mea culpa represents the anti-immigrant party’s latest attempt to project a more acceptable, centrist image of itself to voters ahead of next year’s national elections.
A specially commissioned study acknowledged that Nazi and antisemitic views had featured at party functions and in the party’s printed materials in the 1980s and 90s.
“That there have been clear expressions of antisemitism and support for National Socialist ideas in my party’s history, I think is disgusting and reprehensible,” MP Mattias Karlsson, a leading party ideologist, told a news conference. He specifically apologised “to Swedish citizens of Jewish descent who may have felt a strong sense of insecurity and fear for good reasons.”
The party’s past history has long prevented it from entering Sweden’s political mainstream. The study was commissioned as a means of moving away from the past since the Sweden Democrats aspire to become part of a coalition government after the 2026 election. Although the party, which first entered parliament in 2010, supports Sweden’s governing right-wing coalition government, it has no members in the cabinet.
Tony Gustafsson, the historian commissioned to write the study, noted how neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisations had had an influential role within the party from the 1980s into the 1990s.
“The collaboration seems to have involved using these groups to help distribute election materials,” he said, singling out one group, the “White Aryan Resistance”, as having served as security guards at party gatherings. He also said there had been a clear link to Nazism up until 1995, when current party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, joined the Sweden Democrats, and the party began distancing itself from such associations.
