The leader of Sweden’s Jewish community on Wednesday welcomed a recent apology by the Sweden Democrats right-wing party for past tolerance of antisemitism in its ranks, but noted that its ongoing support for outlawing customs shared by Jews remains an issue.
This remark by Aron Aron Verständig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities, to JNS followed a press conference last week in which Sweden Democrats officials unveiled a 900-word report that they had commission a historian, Tony Gustafsson, to write about its treatment of Jews and past neo-Nazi tendencies.
“It’s indeed a step in the right direction,” said Verständig, but added, “Their opposition to Brit Milah and import of kosher meat is still very problematic for us,” the former referring to Jewish ritual circumcision.
Sweden Democrats lawmaker Richard Jomshof in 2018 submitted a motion to parliament, which did not pass, that called to outlaw the nonmedical circumcision of underage boys. The party has also supported banning the import of meat from animals slaughtered without stunning, a practice that’s already illegal in Sweden.
Observant Jews and Muslims practice different variations of these customs, known in Hebrew as milah and shechitah, respectively.
The Sweden Democrats’ motivation in promoting these bans is widely understood as an attempt to minimize the footprint of Muslim immigrants. Sweden Democrats’ platform says that “We will never bow down to Islamism or any other form of extremism,” and that “We need to stop taking in more asylum seekers […] We also want to see more immigrants return to their native countries.”
The 900-page report documented neo-Nazi tendencies in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats in its early days as a political movement in the 1990s, as well as actions undertaken by the party’s leadership to distance it from hateful ideologies.
“White Aryan Resistance participated in demonstrations held by the Sweden Democrats and appear to have acted as a kind of unofficial security guards” for the party, Gustafsson wrote in his report, referencing a neo-Nazi group. But the last of them left the party by 2007, he also found.
Party leader Jimmie Åkesson last week apologized to Sweden’s Jews in a speech he made at a party congress in Almedalen after reading the report. “I apologize, personally and on behalf of the Sweden Democrats, that there was a time when my party welcomed people with antisemitic beliefs,” he said.
Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, told JNS that “Sweden Democrats are among Israel’s most reliable supporters” in the European political establishment, possessing a “clear moral compass, and the courage to confront issues head on.” He added: “As the report shows in all transparency the party had some problematic roots, but it has undergone a journey.”
The report focused on antisemitism because it “is an acute threat even today and the atrocities that the Jewish people have had to endure stand out,” another Sweden Democrats lawmaker, Mattias Karlsson, told the Dagens Nyheter daily. “I think they were disgusting and abhorrent,” Karlsson said when asked about antisemitic views once tolerated within his party.
The turning point for Sweden Democrats came in 1995 with Åkesson’s ascent as its leader, the report said, when dozens of members were kicked out of the party for antisemitism. This policy has persisted within the Sweden Democrats, said Karlsson.
In the 2022 elections, the Sweden Democrats increased their 62 seats in the lower house of parliament to 73 out of 349. It became the second-largest party, up from third place. Sweden Democrats nonetheless remained in the opposition.
In a 2023 report compiled by the European Friends of Israel association, the Sweden Democrats ranked the 8th most positive to Israel among the dozens of parties represented at the European Parliament, based on their voting records.
In May 2024, Charlie Weimers, a European Parliament member representing the Sweden Democrats and vice chair of that parliament’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, visited Israel where he told a relative of one of the victims of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre by Hamas: “Contrary to everything you hear in the media and the elite, it is important that you know that many people support Israel and stand by Israel.”
Listening to the man’s story, an emotional Weimers knelt down next to him and placed his hand on the man in solidarity, holding back tears.