Sweden’s Nazis March Again
Stockholm anti-racist demonstration, 1994.
Photo Credit Tidskriftsföreningen Offensiv, courtesy of WikiMedia Commons
After the Stockholm Socialist Forum ends, we walk to a restaurant. I was in a panel talking about the presidential election in Chile, where my father is from, and the possibility of a win for left wing candidate Jeanette Jara (she lost against the far right candidate). My friend Zina was on several panels, addressing topics from low fertility rates to Mamdani’s triumph. We are hungry. After dinner we go on to a wine bar. Hours pass. The next time I check my phone, I read that the Neo-Nazi Active Club, guarded by the police, have marched on the main street in the city’s elite district. Someone in a posh flat on the street opened their window to salute the Neo-Nazis with a Sieg Heil.
In the 1990s, I was part of Sweden’s Young Left. At the start of the decade marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, liberals with Francis Fukuyama as their prophet declared the end of the history, meaning the victory of capitalism. Weak and scattered, we on the Left confronted a violent extremist Right: men with shaved heads, bomber jackets, boots, and tight jeans. I never understood the tight jeans. Every November 30th, the Right would gather around the statue of King Karl XII on the anniversary of his death. Confrontations with Antifa would take place close to the Stockholm Opera House. The Neo-Nazis also set up a base in the Old Town by occupying a helicopter pad by the water.
I joined the Young Left in 1994. Only a year and a half later, I was hired as an assistant in the European Parliament for the Swedish Left Party. The global Left grew stronger through the years of the movement of movements, the Zapatista uprising, the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. History gave us the most vital Left since 1968. The internet was new and allowed us to organize globally. I can see this now. But then, I was just a young woman with an immigrant background and brown hair, one of those that the Neo-Nazis labelled svartskalle, meaning blackhead. I was a target. White, drunk, violent men: how could they not frighten me?
America Vera-Zavala. Photo Credit: Daniela Spiroska
Our party headquarters were in the city center, not far from the City Hall that hosts the Nobel Prize dinner. Stockholm is a city on fourteen islands connected by bridges. In the evening, we would want to go to the South, formerly working class, now trendy. To get to the South, we had to traverse the Old Town. The fastest route was passing by the helicopter pad, but that was dangerous because it was occupied by Neo-Nazis. I never, ever walked that way in the nineties. I took a longer detour, still wary, because you never knew where the Neo-Nazis would show up in the Old Town.
Tonight, in November 2025, I read on the phone that the Neo-Nazis are back and my body freezes. I watch my friend’s face and see the same transformation in her. I can take the bus home. She has to take a cab. We agree to text each other when we get home. Safely in bed I receive her message that she is safely home too. I realize that I have done this many times before, but that was a long time ago.
They day after the Socialist Forum is a Sunday and I am going to the Museum of Modern Art with a childhood friend. When I arrive at the park where we are to meet up, the first thing I see is a police car. Then everything speeds up. I realise that it is November 30th, and I am close to the statue and the Neo-Nazis are marching again. I freeze. My head hurts. I stumble and mumble and tell my friend that we have to go to another museum because I cannot walk through that park and someone recognizes me and asks me where the demonstration is and I realize that I did not even know there would be a counter-demonstration and I feel like a coward that I am not going but I don’t want to go because I am terrified, just like I was thirty years ago.
The latest opinion poll shows that the extreme right wing party, the Swedish Democrats, leads among male voters. In our last election in 2022, they received twenty percent of the vote, making them the biggest party on the Right. Sweden’s current government is a coalition of the conservative Moderate party, the small Christian Democrats party, and the even smaller Liberal party. The Swedish Democrats, founded in the nineties with roots in Nazism, has a great formal influence over government politics. A couple of its Members of Parliament used to be part of the Neo-Nazi circles. At the helicopter pad the Neo-Nazis threatened and attacked passing women and people of color. They had no representation in parliament then. In 2010, Sweden elected the extreme right into parliament. The helicopter pad no longer exists.
Recently, I watched the film Interstellar with my fourteen-year-old son. I told him that the director Christopher Nolan was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian novelist who often portrayed time as a navigable dimension. His essay, The Library of Babel, presents the philosophical idea of an eternal, simultaneous existence of all moments. So what is now and what is then? This weekend of the Socialist Forum, I can’t really tell.
The Neo-Nazis are back. Their parliamentary wing is huge, and therefore everyone pretends they are not the skinhead thugs we fled in the nineties. A few weeks ago the magazine Expo (founded by Stieg Larsson, author of the globally bestselling Lisbeth Salander trilogy) revealed that the son of Sweden’s migration minister Johan Forssell is a member of the violent Neo-Nazi circles of Active Club. The minister knew. He did not have to resign. The minister often speaks about parental responsibility when it comes to crime. He wants more people to leave Sweden, to “return” home. The Swedish Right, and more and more the Socialdemocratic Party, with its socialist ideals on paper, have the same discourse as the Swedish Democrats. I know I should be much more afraid of them. And intellectually I am. But the indelible fear in my body is of the Neo-Nazis .
Fascism will always come in new clothes that hide the old ones underneath. We too need to find new garments in which to confront it. Until the day we vanquish it forever.
AMERICA VERA-ZAVALA is a Swedish playwright, theatre director, and activist. Her father is from Chile and her mother from Peru. Her latest book was Svartskalle – en svensk historia, about racism in Sweden in the last thirty years. Her upcoming book, FIESTA, is a memoir of the people’s movements of the 1990s. Her latest play, produced at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, was about illegal adoptions from Chile to Sweden. Instagram: @svartskalle_
