Paulina Neuding

Stockholm Barely a day goes by in Stockholm without a shooting or a bombing. In one part of the city, housing estate residents have been informed about what to do if their building is a bombing target. For all too many Swedes, this is the new normal. Under Swedish law, children under 15 cannot be sentenced to any criminal punishment and older teenagers are seldom given more than four years in ‘compulsory care’. So mobsters now recruit young people, arm them with thermos-flask bombs or guns and send them out as soldiers in their gang wars. The country’s liberal criminal justice system and the fact that the police were never trained for such problems have made life comfortable for new gangs in immigrant neighbourhoods.

Sweden has seen streets riots before. The country has witnessed attacks on police and rescue workers. But what played out this Easter weekend has left Swedes in shock. Rasmus Paludan, a Danish politician on the extreme right who also holds Swedish citizenship, decided to tour the country last week, seeking out immigrant neighbourhoods where he could stage public burnings of the Quran. Paludan’s support in Sweden is isolated to the very fringes of the extreme right, especially since it was alleged last year that he had written sexually explicit messages to underage boys online. But there is no prohibition against blasphemy in Swedish law, which is why the police granted him permission for his rallies. Chaos erupted almost everywhere he went.

We're closing 2020 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here's No. 10: Paulina Neuding on a Swedish crime wave. ‘We have an obvious problem,’ admitted the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven recently. He was referring not to the Covid pandemic, but to a summer of crime that has left even jaded Swedes reeling in disbelief. There are regular bombings, hand grenade attacks and shootings. Young men are killing each other at a horrific rate — ten times that of Germany. The feeling is growing that the government has completely lost control. Yet, while Löfven has finally acknowledged the existence of the problem, he still seems in denial about its true nature.

The mass sexual assaults around Cologne's main railway station on New Year’s Eve 2015 rocked Germany, not just because of their scale (police believe hundreds of men were involved) but because of the sense that news of the attacks was being suppressed, and its links to the migrant crisis then at its peak, denied. In response to public anger, Chancellor Angela Merkel was moved to promise that the crimes would be met with a 'hard response from the state'. Three years on, what has happened to that response? In terms of resources, German authorities have delivered on Merkel’s promise. It has been followed by one of the most extensive criminal investigations in the history of modern Germany. More than 600 victims of sexual offences have been questioned.

Last Friday, only hours after the terrorist attack in central Stockholm, police found themselves pelted by rocks in the city’s largely immigrant Tensta neighbourhood. The following evening, officers were once again attacked, this time in Hammarkullen in Gothenburg. On Sunday, a familiar story: rioters aimed Molotov cocktails and a fire bomb at police as unrest broke out in the area. In the days following the truck attack, Swedish newspapers had been full of defiant headlines: ‘Stockholm stands united’ and ‘Love conquers all.’ But the subsequent violence put paid to much of that: ‘Unity’ and ‘love’ are, for many Swedes, not the words that spring instantly to mind.