Sweden’s prime minister has said the Scandinavian country has failed to integrate many of the immigrants who have settled there over the past 20 years, creating a nation of “parallel societies … living in different realities”.
Unveiling a series of measures to tackle organised crime after violent riots over the Easter weekend that left more than 100 police injured, Magdalena Andersson said Islamism and rightwing extremism had been allowed to fester in Sweden.
“Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden,” the Social Democrat prime minister told a news conference. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”
Integration had been “too poor, at the same time as we have experienced very substantial levels of immigration”, Andersson added. “Society has been too weak, resources for the police and social services have been too weak.”
The number of people living in Sweden who were born abroad has doubled over the past 20 years to about 2 million, or one-fifth of the population. Andersson said it was “crucial to prevent more children and young people from being drawn into crime”.
She said she aimed to introduce local “youth delinquency boards”, in which social services and police would collaborate closely, in addition to putting in place tools to ensure young people stayed in school and off the streets.
The justice and home affairs minister, Morgan Johansson, outlined plans to give the police greater electronic surveillance powers, facilitate the exchange of information between authorities, and deny residence even to people not yet convicted of a crime.
“What we saw were no political protests,” Andersson said of the riots. “Police were attacked with stones and molotov cocktails. It was not a political act, it was a criminal act – an attack on the democracy that many have actually fled to.”
The riots erupted after a notorious anti-immigrant provocateur, the Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan, threatened to tour the country burning the Qur’an. Police clashed with groups of mostly masked young men in several towns and cities.
Police insisted they had to grant permits for Paludan’s incendiary events, planned mainly in areas with large Muslim populations, because of the country’s liberal freedom of speech laws, but Johansson said those freedoms were being abused by “extremists” to foster “hate, division and violence”.
Dozens of people were arrested after three days of rioting in Norrköping, Linköping, Landskrona, Örebro, Malmö and the capital, Stockholm. A school was also set alight and 20 police vehicles either damaged or destroyed.
Sweden has radically tightened its immigration policies since taking in more people per capita than any other EU country during the migration crisis of 2015, and now has one of the bloc’s most restrictive policies along with neighbouring Denmark.