MEP Charlie Weimers says his party has had to consider ‘other options’ in light of Orbán’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The mere specter of Viktor Orbán is causing ructions on the right wing of the European Parliament.
Leading Sweden Democrats lawmaker Charlie Weimers suggested in written comments to POLITICO’s EU Election Playbook on Friday that he could pull his MEPs out of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group if Orbán’s Fidesz MEPs join up.
Orbán himself has openly expressed a desire to join the ECR — dominated by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law & Justice party. The former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has also said he’s open to bringing in Fidesz. Meloni and Orbán have developed close ties at the European Council, with the Italian prime minister increasingly seen as a bridge between Budapest and Brussels.
I know nothing of the Swedish political spectrum. Are they as bad as you suggest?
In the last election they did really well and at the after party one of the spokespeople got drunk and repeatedly tried to sneak in the Swedish version of sieg heil when national television interviewed her.
They are basically neo-nazis that learned to put on a suit and pretend that they are human.
“Really well” = 2nd largest party in Sweden.
lol wait what??? That sounds pretty wild
Swedish neonazis has the expression “Hell Seger” that is basically sieg heil. The spokesperson was slurring and she kept saying that it was nice with a helg seger (weekend victory). A sentence that doesn’t make sense grammatically the way she said it and it doesn’t make sense contextually because it was Sunday night and all elections are always Sunday night. She put up her arms when she said it in a way that wasn’t the salute but you could see her trying to figure out how close she could take it. It was the most obvious thing because she was drunk but they routinely have those kinds of problem.
One of the party leaders tried to beat up a guy with an iron pipe in broad daylight and he continues to be a high ranking member for almost a decade. The whole party is fucked up and they keep winning more votes.
Jesus, that’s pretty fucked :(
The list is so long though, it is impossible to give a good overview in a post. Like the spokesperson (not sure if that title is accurate, more of a public frontfigure) mentioned in the above post also made post of her listening to Kanye West, right after all the antisemitic stuff, while calling Anne Frank “hornyness personified” or something like that. She is still in the party, last I heard, they just moved her to a less public position. And that is just one person.
The party elite and their youtube channel often talks about things like there being a group of people in the public institutions with a explicit goal to annihilate the swedish nation by, among other things, the import of muslims. They have said that the means for which to rid sweden of this “totally not a conspiracy theory” is to, I kid you not, turn sweden into the same type of autocracy as they have in Hungary. That is their publically stated goals which they have defended for years.
I do not trust these nazis on anything they say. If there is anything true to article it would be that their long support for Orban does not look too good now that they try to be pro-NATO and he is the last person in their way.
It’s been a horrific sight to see the whitewashing that the media has done for SD. It the 90s it wasn’t even on the map that they would be accepted by anyone.
But alas. Boomers wanting “ordning och reda” and people without critical thinking skills who once read a Facebook post about someone not born here doing something wrong, made it happen.
Incredible.
Ja nån jävla ordning får det fan ta å va! Jag har faktiskt gått livets hårda skola å jag vet massor om livet, så vad är deras ursäkter att inte bara åka ner till hamnen å ta ett hederligt jobb?
Hahah du låter som farsans granne.
The Sweden Democrats started as a anti-immigrant campaign and in the early years were mostly doing extremely blatant, racist, antisemitic and anti-black propaganda (stickers, posters, radio broadcasts) and organising demonstrations which attracted loads of neo-nazi skinheads. Leading to riots and attacks around their events. This was in the dark decade of the 90s, the atmosphere was similar in Sweden to most of Europe with neofascism returning to the open. Murders, arsons against refugee camps, the wave was everywhere. There are photos from their early years with officials wearing swastika armbands. Since in these groups we know historically that everyone wants to be the Führer they had the more radical individuals trying to coup the party leading to several splinter groups weakening them. This problem plus a very strong antifascist campaign against them led to them taking on a more “serious” path trying to get off the street hooliganism and into local politics/councils. They succeeded with that and have become more and more mainstream to be able to grow, so their party program is now very watered down from their original nazi roots. Their focus now is “law and order” and anti-islam and they attract the general racist, conservative, uneducated, by far mostly male and by far mostly rural voters. They get around 20 % of the votes for over ten years now, if I remember correctly.
Initially all other parties refused to work with them in any way but this has started to weaken in recent years and after the last election the new right-wing government (“tories”, cristian democrats, a mish-mash of right-wing conservatives) decided to take them on as a “support party” in the parliament. So they are not in the government but directly influence the governments actions with their support votes, without them the government would be too weak. It’s really awful.
But even if they are now the 2nd or 3rd largest party they still house open fascists. And there is scandal after scandal happening. Someone already mentioned the recent “sieg heil” thing in a comment. A few years ago there was a scandal where three of the party’s most prominent parliamentary individuals had a night out, getting drunk, harassing people on the streets which ended up with them gearing up with metal rods from a building site getting ready for “a fight”. Of course these stupid nazi fucks filmed it all and it was leaked to media. So the party is forced to do cleanouts of these problematic individuals very often, but the party somehow STILL maintains more or less unaffected in the polls. Even though this self-proclaimed “law and order” party obviously has bonehead thugs in their leadership. It’s laughable. But tragic. It says a lot about the voting grounds in Sweden, there is so much everyday-racism.
With that said, Sweden is not really more racist than most other countries in Europe, I would even argue less so than most. This problem is identical everywhere, racism/fascism is deeply rooted culturally.
I hope this helps to understand this shameful party.
I don’t know anything about Sweden either, but if this is the same grouping that already contains Italy’s Meloni, yeah it’s pretty bad. Her party was pretty openly pro-Mussolini until very recently when they did the bare minimum needed to soften up their image and get her elected.
Today, not even close. The party has neo-nazi roots, but the vast majority of the “old-guard” are long gone (afaik), most of them ending up in AFS (swedish equivalent of AFD) or Nordfront (actual nazis). If someone behaves questionably, they tend to be thrown out head-first rather promptly.
The SD gained popularity and won their platform by a) becoming more moderate and b) being the only mainstream-ish party to speak out against the mass immigration waves of the 2010s, something which they at the time were entirely shunned for. Today however, almost all politicians agree that the open door policy for refugees and economic migrants went too far.
Many of our problems here in Sweden today have to some degree been caused or exacerbated by that careless era (not that there weren’t problems before). Seeing welfare systems be dismantled, schools closing, worsening healthcare, infrastructure etc. etc. whilst at the same time huge amounts of resources were diverted to immigrants pushes folks in that direction. It also really doesn’t help that many kinds of violent crime previously entirely unheard of have become commonplace in less than adecade.
They said things would go to shit, things went to shit, now more than a fifth of Swedish voters voted for them in the last election, making them the 2nd largest party.
All in all it’s not that surprising that bringing folks from one cultural extreme into a society at the opposite cultural extreme ends up causing tensions and issues…