Sweden will do whatever it takes, including sending in the army, to end a wave of violence that has seen a string of deadly shootings, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in Wednesday.
Sweden's murder rate is relatively low in international terms, but gang violence has surged in recent years and Swedes are worried that the police are unable to cope.
In 2016, the latest year for which official statistics are available, 106 people were murdered in Sweden, a country of 10 million.
But Swedish TV reported there were over 300 shootings, mostly in turf battles between gangs over drugs, protection rackets and prostitution.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Monday February 26 2018, @08:51PM (2 children)
The article says:
The Sverigedemokraterna [wikipedia.org] are not in government (yet?). So, no, you can only say that the Sverigedemokraterna political party is full of racists now.
And I don't think that that is news. What else are Neo-Nazis going to vote for and become member of, in the Swedish political spectrum [blogspot.se]??
(the blue blåsippa flower at the top means SD).
Mind you, I don't know if you can say that the SD are Neo-Nazis. Probably not.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26 2018, @10:34PM
SD are most certainly not neo-nazis, nor any other kind of nazis. When the party was founded there were people from the scene involved which has led to this stamp being applied by opponents. Those opponents tend to ignore the fact that the Social Democratic party actually sympathised with the nazis in WWII, that this party was leading in founding a racial-biological research lab to try to keep Sweden "racially clean", that the newspaper "Aftonbladet" supported the nazis during the war and many more of such salacious details.
If you want to place the Sweden Democrats in the traditional left-right scale they end up somewhere to the left of the middle related to their economic and most of their social policies, to the right of the middle where it concerns migration issues. Their political program is in large lines comparable to that of the Social Democratic party in the 50's and 60's in that they want to (re)build a welfare state based on high taxation where the benefits go to Swedish citizens. This last part, their insistence on Swedish taxpayers' money primarily being used to provide services to Swedish citizens is what separates them from other high-taxation parties like the Social Democrats, Communists (they call themselves "Vänsterpartiet" since the demise of the Soviet Union, their policies however have not changed markedly since so it is logical to keep on using their old moniker when referring to them), Greens, 'Center' and 'Liberals' (both 'Liberalerna' as well as 'nya Moderaterna' can be included here).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @04:34AM
> Mind you, I don't know if you can say that the SD are Neo-Nazis. Probably not.
No. They are just racist as hell. They are not Nazis because the Nazis were national socialists and the SD are very devoutly neoliberal, taking Thatcherism up a few notches.
They are now one of the major parties in size because they are the sole party to address Islam in any meaningful way. However, they are not allowed to go after Islam directly. Since it is absolutely forbidden in Sweden to publicly criticize or even question Islam, on pain of fines and jail, they go after «immigrants» in general because that is actually allowed. It's a vile move but allowed so they do it and it is just bait to get people to sign on to their extreme neoliberalism.