Swedish party leaders condemn attack on anti-fascism meeting

The leaders of all of Sweden’s eight parties condemned an attack on an anti-fascism meeting in Gubbängen, south of Stockholm, on Wednesday evening.

Masked men, described by anti-racism magazine Expo, whose reporter was present at the scene, as “a group of Nazis”, entered the room, physically attacked some of the visitors, sprayed red paint and threw a smoke bomb into the venue.

The meeting was organised by the Left Party and the Green Party, and Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar visited Gubbängen after the attack to show her support. She told public broadcaster SVT that an “open event, for equality among individuals” was “violently attacked by those who seemed to be Nazis”, calling on “all political forces” to fight the “far right that threatens our democracy”.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, of the conservative Moderate Party, said he had reached out to Dadgostar to express his support.

“It’s terrible that a meeting organised by the Left Party has been attacked,” he told the TT news agency. “This type of hateful behaviour has no place in our free and open society.”

“My thoughts are with the people affected. Right-wing extremists want to frighten us into silence. They must never succeed,” wrote centre-left Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson on X.

Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, told TT that “politically motivated violence is terrible in all forms, and does not belong in Sweden”. He urged “all democratic forces to, in full unity, stand up against all kinds of politically motivated violence”.

Swedish vocabulary: to condemn – att fördöma

Sweden’s controversial stop-and-search zones come into force

A controversial law enabling police to introduce stop-and-search zones came into effect today.

The law means that police are able to designate a certain area a “security zone” if there is “significant” risk of a conflict between criminal gangs involving shootings or explosions, and the zone is considered to be of “extraordinary” importance to stem the tide of violence.

“These are strong legal terms, and in other words nothing that will be taken lightly and happen everywhere,” Kristian Malzoff, a police officer who was involved in developing the police authority’s guidance on how to put the new law into practice, told TT. 

He said most people in these areas won’t be searched. At the time of writing, no area had yet been designated a stop-and-search zone.

The zones can be introduced for a maximum of two weeks at a time, and means that police are allowed to stop adults or children, or search vehicles, without there being a concrete suspicion that a crime has been committed. But it’s not supposed to be used to carry out random searches, so there needs to be a reason such as the person behaving in an odd way, who they’re in contact with, or intelligence reports.

Concerns have been raised that it opens the door to discrimination. At the moment it is not possible for a person who is stopped by police and feels that they were discriminated against on, for example, racial grounds to report it to Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman. That’s because police work is not covered by Sweden’s laws on discrimination, although legislation is in the pipeline which may change that.

Swedish vocabulary: security zones – säkerhetszoner (more commonly referred to as visitationszoner)

Swedish healthcare strike threatening to break out at 4pm

A healthcare strike is set to break out at 4pm on Thursday unless the parties reach an agreement at the eleventh hour.

A strike would potentially see 63,000 members of the Swedish Association of Health Professionals, a healthcare union representing nurses, midwives, biomedical scientists and radiographers, refusing to work overtime unless their demands on salary and schedules are met.

But negotiations with SKR, the umbrella organisation for Swedish regions, and employer organisation Sobona have not yet brought the parties closer together. Late on Wednesday the union and SKR and Sobona again rejected each other’s bids and counter proposals.

The union said earlier this month that the workers they represent in total worked 3 million hours in overtime last year.

Swedish vocabulary: overtime – övertid