The influencer Jan Emanuel Johansson arrives at the marina at Djurgården in a red Ferrari. The documentary soap winner, the welfare millionaire and the former Social Democrat member of parliament will take a ride in his private yacht.
At the harbor, a reporter from Svenska Dagbladet meets. Johansson will be allowed to test the newspaper’s new election compass, which shows which party he is closest to in terms of opinion. In pilot glasses, a tight white t-shirt and a college jacket, he clicks through the questions.
When the result comes it will be a cold shower. The muscular macho man, with a political pub tour with Jimmie Åkesson in the back, has proven to sympathize most with the Green Party! “No! This was the worst thing I have ever experienced! ” exclaims Johansson. “The Green Party is a collection of chairs, the political evil.”
A little later, Johansson will appear in front of his hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram in a macabre movie clip with something that is supposed to represent a dead man wrapped in rope in a black garbage bag and a sign with the text “I regret that I voted for the Green Party last election”.
The muscular macho influencer, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a political pub tour with Jimmie Åkesson in the back, has proven to sympathize with the Green Party.
what is it that drives such expressions? In her book “Oceankänslan”, the former spokeswoman Isabella Lövin writes about the special kind of hatred directed at the Green Party. Last year, a survey from Brå showed that the party bypassed the Sweden Democrats as Sweden’s most threatened. Particularly vulnerable are the party’s female representatives, with constant harassment and threats of sexual violence. Isabella Lövin states that disgust with the party in many Norrland counties has become a work environment problem for its representatives and sympathizers.
However, the contempt for the Green Party is not unique to Sweden. In other parts of Europe, too, the environmental and climate movement is the subject of hate campaigns and false rumors. Ahead of the election in Germany in 2021, Annalena Baerbock, the Greens’ mouthpiece, was the subject of twice as many fake news as any of the other candidates, Isabella Lövin writes in her book. Among other things, it was alleged that the Greens wanted to ban pets because of their carbon dioxide emissions, ban barbecues and introduce Koran teaching. In Sweden, too, angry campaigns have arisen against fictitious “news” such as the Green Party wanting to introduce a ban on riding schools and the use of wood stoves. When the price of petrol is raised, anger is not directed at oil-producing rogue states but at the Green Party.
The main rhetorical the figure in all these contexts is that the party would represent an elite that wants to destroy for the real “people”. In September 2021, SD MP Thomas Morell wrote, for example, that the Green Party’s vision for the future constitutes “not only a danger to society but is a threat to the whole of civilization”.
By extension of this rhetoric, there is also a threat of physical violence. This week, the newspaper Syre revealed that a right-wing extremist site has launched a hanging campaign against climate activists, where with Nazi symbols and rhetoric about racial traitors, they call on their followers to infiltrate the environmental movement.
As said. What drives this hatred? Where does so much anger come from?
Isabella Lövin suspects in his book that one reason is that the Green Party stood up for the right to asylum during the refugee crisis in 2015. But basically, I think, it is even more that the party’s critique of civilization is perceived as increasingly provocative as the climate and sustainability crisis becomes impossible to ignore from in reality. When Europe is once again burning in a new heat wave, the messenger is rolled in tar and feathers.
One does not have to sympathize with the Green Party to find this type of disinformation disgusting
You do not have to sympathize with the Green Party to find this campaign disgusting. DN’s political editor Amanda Sokolnicki recently confronted the Swedish right with how their fixation on the Green Party is allowed to overshadow a policy based on reason and facts, such as when local moderates cut and paste horror images of wind turbines lined up along the shore, even though in reality will be far out of sight. “The climate debate has been allowed to be about how annoyed you are at the Green Party (and how you can best annoy it). Not what needs to be achieved “, wrote Sokolnicki.
It’s against this one background difficult to digest that concepts such as “climate-committed” or “environmentalists” are used as derogatory remarks in the political debate. Limiting greenhouse gas emissions or preserving biodiversity is not a special interest for “those involved”. It is, as the author Lars Gustafsson used to say, a “parapolitical” question: a prerequisite for all other politics.
Limiting greenhouse gas emissions or conserving biodiversity is not a special interest for those particularly ‘committed’.
Nor is climate change about destroying the joy of people or ruining the things in life that people value. It is about the exact opposite. The transition is about preserving as much as possible of what makes life worth living. Implementing it will certainly cost. But not half as much as not doing it. It is one of the most intolerable paradoxes of our time that the more obvious this fact becomes, the more people choose to turn a blind eye to it.
For the same reason The incitement campaign against the Green Party will probably be stepped up even more before the election, as the party’s continued existence in the Riksdag can probably decide the government issue. Both ideological and economic interests have much to gain from the MP leaving.
Jan Emanuel Johansson, for his part, tells a right-wing radical website that he will make “a hell of a party” if the party he most sympathizes with disappears from the Riksdag. As a counterweight, another heavyweight Social Democrat opinion leader, Dala-Democrat’s editor-in-chief Göran Greider, confessed that he was now, for the first time, considering abandoning his grounded ideological skepticism towards the Greens: support vote for the Green Party “, wrote Greider this week in Dagens ETC.
The selection compasses continue to spin. Both at Dalälven and on the country’s luxury yachts.
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