Why is the recent “The Grand Replacement” racist communication surprising for many Swedes?

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For the last weeks, I have been focusing on writing about the recent scandal and political debate in Sweden regarding the case leading members of the far-right Sweden Democrats (ECR) (or as I call them, Sweden Ethnocrats) political party have been expressing and promoting opinions that are based on “The Grand Replacement” racist and conspiracy theory.

In this post, I am writing about the recent article my intellectual friend and liberal opinion-maker Hynek Pallas, who is active in the discussions about racism in Europe.

• Pallas writes that the conspiracy theory of population replacement is far from new but has moved from extreme to mainstream. Yet the Swedish political debate seems to be caught off guard.

• Pallas's recent article is also based on the new book by Kenan Malik. "Not So Black and White – A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics.” Malik is one of Europe's sharpest minds on identity politics and racism. He describes how the conspiracy theory of "population replacement" in the 2010s went from far-right extremism to conservative mainstream.

• In Malik's regard, this is one of the larger changes regarding racism in the past decade as a journey and mutation from the fringe to established media and parliamentary politics. Pallas writes that the topic is mainly absent from Swedish ideological and political debate.

• The recent debate in Sweden was partly started by one of the leading far-right politicians Richard Jomshof tweeting about how Swedes "are on their way to becoming a minority in their own country."

  
  Pallas writes that among the reactions, some editorial offices started counting the number of immigrants, showing that the numbers do not prove that Muslims are about to take over. This action can be seen as an understandable fact-checking reaction but also an argument that is meaningless and dangerous to get drawn into regarding debates with racists and far-right extremists.

• Pallas argues that racism is the ideology driving the far-right politics behind this "census" Experts describe it as repressive measures. The Swedish Tax Agency and Statistics Sweden estimate that about 98 percent of the population registrations in Sweden are correct.

• Pallas writes that in 2011, conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus published "Le Grand Remplacement" (roughly: the great population replacement), claiming that a globalist elite is replacing white Europeans with non-Europeans.
  
  Germany is now "less intelligent, less moral, and no longer Germany." during the 2010s, “more respectable names,” wrote on the subject. One example is Thilo Sarrazin, former finance minister in Berlin's state government and board member of Germany's central bank, who lamented in the book "Germany Abolishes Itself" over the declining white population and the high birth rate among immigrants.
  

• Another example is the far-right politician Éric Zemmour, a candidate in the French presidential election in 2022, who argues in "The French Suicide" from 2014 that Europe is committing "deliberate suicide" because the left has "betrayed the people in the name of minorities."
  

• Pallas also writes that political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s book "Whiteshift" in the English-speaking world argued that politics are being reshaped by demographic change, where "white identity" is threatened by non-white immigration.
  
  At the same time, Pallas describes that the biggest impact regarding the debate came from Douglas Murray's bestseller "The Strange Death of Europe" in 2017. Murray is a leading figure in British conservative circles, editor of the magazine Spectator, and a popular author. Murray has, among other things, written things such as that "other people have replaced large parts of European populations" and offers "analyses" such as blaming Muslims for closing English pubs. All part of a shift where the label "demography" – a euphemism for "deviant" culture and ethnicity – replaces socio-economic conversations.

  
  

• Pallas points out that although Sweden lacks domestic bestsellers, Murray's and Kaufmann's ideas have also spread in Sweden. He writes that, like “many other peddlers of these theories,” they have described Sweden as a horror example. For example, Murray believes Sweden is "full of people dressed for Arabian sandstorms." While in February, Kaufmann spoke at a conference organized by the Ax: son Johnson Foundation (conservative, pro-business), and his articles are published in magazines like Kvartal.
  

• Pallas writes that racist ideas have gained a foothold in the center of Swedish politics faster than elsewhere through the power the Sweden Democrats have over the current government. SD has always portrayed "multiculturalism" as an existential threat to Sweden. For the SD, the mere presence of immigrants and other cultures means an imagined homogeneous nation-state is broken down. Also, the party had for several years terms as "inherited essence” in its program until a few years ago.
  

• According to Pallas, while previous far-right theories have become political practice, there is a lack of debate on how this shift has arisen in Europe and the USA. It is therefore not surprising that SD's top figure, Mattias Karlsson, as Kalla Fakta (TV 4 in Sweden) recently revealed, co-wrote a manifesto claiming that an elite wants to replace Swedish culture with radical Islam. Such racist theories have an equally strong grip on Hungary as on the Republican Party in the US – where a congressman tweeted in 2016 - "we cannot restore our civilization with someone else's children."
  

• Pallas writes that when "Whiteshift" was published, he was the only one to review it Göteborgs Posten (The Gothenburg Post, right-wing daily) even though the book had been written about by editorial writers in Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish Daily Paper, right-wing daily) as a role model. While Murray's book was to be discussed on Swedish Radio, they found no counter-debater who had bothered to open it.
  

• Pallas writes that when it comes to problems regarding “shadow societies,” much other empirical research, the conclusion is that parallel societies are best broken down with greater and stronger rights for the vulnerable – to which many immigrants belong. Ideologies like population replacement theories are concrete examples of how such parties do not exist on a left-right scale but are something new in Europe outside of democracy. And for that, Swedish intellectuals and the opposition must arm themselves much better than they have so far.
  

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