One late autumn evening my boss called and as soon as I saw his name on the display I knew what it was about. During the day, it had been reported in the media about the psychiatry coordinator Ing-Marie Wieselgren's killer, a terrorist suspected right-wing extremist, who had a long list of, among other things, journalists and politicians he wanted to kill or who would in any case be cataloged as traitors and the enemy.
My manager's tone was hushed, as if delivering an obituary: "I'm not happy to have to make this call. I'm sure you've already figured out what it's about."
I reacted as I usually do in certain pressured situations, I tighten up and can't handle exposing anything in the moment. I didn't get hysterical, I didn't start crying, I took in the information that I was on the list, how the newspaper handled the matter, and that of course I would get the support that was required - although the danger itself seemed limited, because the man was in custody and I was just one of hundreds of others.
After the phone call, I curled up next to my partner on the sofa like someone seeking physical protection. We were in Bohuslän, far from the newspaper. Outside the window panes, the evening was impenetrably black. Even so, it felt as if we were at peace here, that the children were safe just by being in an old house far away from everything, as if a wood stove and floral wallpaper were a protection against the modern fury.
Looking through the list he had drawn up in typical right-wing fashion, I felt a kind of unholy relief that so many were on it. The list invited jokes that he might as well have listed the people in culture, politics and media whom he did not want to hurt or hated.
We had meetings with the editor-in-chief and the newspaper's security officer, DN has become sadly efficient and good at dealing with threats to employees. We know what the purpose of threats usually is, that it is mostly to scare us and make us shut up and therefore we tell each other not to be scared, at least not to shut up.
The message I received that autumn evening in 2022 was just a confirmation of something that had been going on for ten years. This time the threat had bypassed a prosecutor's office and came from a suspected murderer, there was a difference, of course. But the concern was not new.
It had arisen in the early 2010s. The threats and aggressiveness followed the new political trend like a long shadow. You can call that trend right-wing populism, nationalism, authoritarian right; regardless of the label, it looked like it did in my inbox.
For me, the emergence of the Sweden Democrats and entry into the Riksdag in 2010 was something incredible. I could and cannot understand how a party that grew out of Nazi movements is allowed to remotely control a Swedish government. I have expressed that opinion in DN many times over and in different ways. Not because opinion has changed, but because the issue has constantly grown, the party has grown, other parties have given them everything on a silver platter.
I know the worry has eaten into me, even though it wasn't supposed to happen. It feels defiling that I have allowed myself to be influenced.
Over the years, emails came with suggestions about what kind of rape I would have to be subjected to, in order to "better understand" why the Sweden Democrats are right and I am wrong. Most of the time it wasn't quite that advanced, just a torrent of dark anger and always had to do with articles about SD, or if I expressed something feminist or anti-racist. Over time, I have come to understand how the issues are connected, that there is a right-wing nationalist community of opinion that singles out, above all, women in the public eye who do not share their worldview.
I know the worry has eaten into me, even though it wasn't supposed to happen. It feels defiling that I have allowed myself to be influenced.
I have continued to write about right-wing extremism and how it is normalized by the fact that the SD has become government support. But I haven't written with the same clarity, because I've known that when I write, I also have to put up with the rage in the email inbox and on social media. I have to push away the thoughts of the lists and catalogs of the nationalists.
Eventually, I and many others who experienced the same thing understood that it was not individual private individuals who reacted spontaneously, but that the emailing was organized. The same thing on what was then called Twitter, now X. It wasn't a huge amount of grassroots that attacked, but something much more advanced.
It is a manifestation of the zeitgeist, one that has spread throughout the Western world, that online hatred and threats against journalists have grown. But it is no coincidence that it also happened in connection with the party's development in Sweden. I thought that something decisive would change when TV4 and the reporter Daniel Andersson revealed in 2024 that the SD ran its own troll factories whose task was to create unrest and hunt down journalists. It didn't happen that way, at least not at the time.
"Election after election of paralyzing horror, of triumphant leather skulls in suits who with shiny eyes chewed through mandate after mandate", writes Jens Liljestrand in Expressen about how the election vigils used to be (14/9).
The Sweden Democrats come out of the Nazi movement and no political movement in Sweden is as prone to violence as the extreme right. It is a fact, confirmed by, among others, Säpo.
Perhaps it is there, in the primitive, human fear of being beaten, that in any case part of the confusion surrounding SD should be understood, in the concern for a capital of violence. In the fear of physical pain, at a deep level that people don't understand themselves until the threat seems to diminish.
I have to push away the thoughts of the lists and catalogs of the nationalists
Three percentage points less. Three. It's a silly number. But this didn't feel silly. For the first time since SD entered the Riksdag, they backed down and I felt an exhalation that I didn't quite understand, it reminded me of when pain lets go.
The pain was fear. So I have been afraid.
The day after the election, it was as if Maud Olofsson in P1 Morgon could no longer cope with the general fear of a single party. A mildly worded summary that the Tidö government had moved far to the right during the cooperation with the SD caused one of the presenters to say the customary "Now no one from the SD is here and can defend themselves."
"But then, that's stupid. Every time they're not here and have to defend themselves, you say this, but you never do that if a center party member is absent or another party, I'm so tired of hearing this. Sorry," said Maud Olofsson.
"It's like Sveriges Radio's impartiality rules that mean we have to say this and I hope we do the same with other parties as well," replied the presenter.
"No. That's what you don't do," said Olofsson.
She refused to accept the crouching rules of etiquette that have arisen in everything to do with the Sweden Democrats, which is not only about impartiality, but which appears as an internalized fear of irony.
More than 17 percent of voters are still masses. And yet – as I felt the relief, I understood something about what the last 15 years have meant in my professional life, the effects of the long shadow.
