Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt perfectly demonstrated the European elite’s ignorance of the impacts of uncontrolled borders over the weekend by saying immigration has been handled “relatively well” by Stockholm and that gang crime is a “fringe phenomenon.”
“In the best of worlds,” jibed Sweden Democrats MP Martin Kinnunen, “Carl Bildt would have been a fringe phenomenon in Swedish politics.” Having recognised the scale of the problem, his party says it is working hard to “dismantle the gangs.”
Tiden då Socialdemokraterna styrde landet och daltade med de kriminella gängen är förbi.
Steg för steg monterar vi ner gängen. Vi har stärkt Polisen och infört en helt ny förverkandelagstiftning som gör det enklare att ta gängens pengar.
Police officials say that more than 67,000 people are now involved in or connected to organised gang crime, including street shootings and bombings. The situation has got so bad that Canada has warned its citizens to exercise caution when travelling to the country, whose reputation has shifted significantly since the onset of massive illegal migration.
And even children are increasingly being exploited in acts of gang violence, prompting the government to introduce reforms allowing those as young as 15 to be sentenced to prison.
Yet Bildt insists there are “paradise-like conditions” in Sweden compared to, say, Chicago, like that makes it any better.
Journalist Paulina Neuding suggested in the national daily Svenska Dagbladet that the former PM suffered from “luxury beliefs,” a term coined by psychologist Rob Henderson, meaning opinions that signal high status for the establishment classes but harm those below them. Yet this luxury belief is, Neuding argued, “others’ reality.”
When discussing this state of affairs in what was once one of the safest countries in the world, one can point out that the situation is worse in the United States. But that is not a consolation, but a trivialisation.
Writing in Göteborgs-Posten, Adam Cwejman added that “Bildt seems to live in a different reality.” He said that “collisions in parking lots” could be described as a “fringe phenomenon,” while organised crime—including “gang wars, assassinations, drug trafficking, fraud against private individuals and the state, infiltration of authorities and public administrations”—is a major, (for most) unavoidable problem that has “dominated Swedish politics for a decade.”
It is surely time, saidExpressen deputy political editor Linda Jerneck, for Bildt to retire and move abroad, from where “14-year-old contract killers and row houses blown to smithereens certainly look like a marginal phenomenon.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
