The party had gone big with a proposal to ban dual citizenship. A policy completely in line with SD’s ideology, hardly surprising, but still a proposal that came to bite the party in the tail.
It turned out that a large proportion of those who would be affected by the proposed SD policy were Finns. Many also belonged to SD’s own voters. So you had to back off. “We didn’t mean you.”
And that’s how it usually sounds.
Sweden currently has five recognized minorities that are included in the Act on National Minorities and Minority Languages. This includes Roma, Jews, Sámi, Tornedals and Swedish Finns. Our languages are protected, we have the right to practice and explore our respective cultures and affinities and much more.
When the Tidö government cut off the grants to all ethnic associations, it did not apply to the national minorities.
“We don’t mean you.”
I am grateful for the Swedish minority legislation, which was developed after centuries of state violence and oppression against the respective languages and diaspora. It is all well documented. From the protective inside of the law, it is also interesting to follow contemporary Swedish political development.
The Sweden Democrats do not want to withdraw Finnish-Swedish citizenship. Nor would they ever propose wiretapping synagogues, or banning Jewish religious symbols in public in the same way that Richard Jomshof (SD) wants to ban Muslim ones.
They don’t mean us, they mean those others.
So when SD leader Jimmie Åkesson said that he wants the government – not the court – to have the right to deport people who threaten the “interests of the kingdom” and revoke Swedish citizenship for the same reason, I may not think he means us Finns. He means those others again.
But I do not know. With SD’s entry into government power, a slide in legal certainty and citizenship has been initiated – and quickly accelerated.
And it’s not just about SD’s proposed policy. It is about attitudes that have infected the entire political landscape and an increased acceptance of further state violence against minorities.
Dual citizenships are now recognized as suspect. Säpo wanted this year to be able to almost completely port Swedish-Iranian citizens from government jobs, regardless of information about the person in general.
Even today, people are deported from Sweden without ever finding out why. Säpo secrecy outweighs legal certainty.
Kurds are monitored by both Turkish and Swedish security services. People lose their jobs based on alleged connections they never get specified.
A GDR-Sweden, but only for some.
Jimmie Åkesson is completely open in Aftonbladet that people will end up in trouble if he gets his way with the deportations and citizenships; if the power to throw people out ends up in his own government hands. It must be worth it, he says.
Such a development is of course a threat to everyone with foreign citizenship in Sweden, especially when the bar is “threaten the interests of the kingdom” and that threat is defined by the same government that makes decisions about the deportations.
Will I know what I’ve done when the border police come knocking? Was it something I wrote? Have I talked too much with a specific neighbor?
For another journalist, in the near future it may be about having dug too close to something the government wants to keep secret. The new law on foreign espionage, which prohibits the dissemination of information that could damage Sweden’s international relations, has already stopped publications in SVT.
The next step is outlined in this now. Journalists, activists, artists, writers and everyone else with a foreign background who moves in public have to look over their shoulder.
They don’t mean you, all the quiet talented immigrants. They mean us.