Local Swedish Democrats member forced to step back after BLM criticism

Both the municipal leadership and his own party asked him to step down. He told conservative Swedish weekly Nya Tider, that while individual members supported him, he feels partly betrayed by the local party leadership.

Andersen had been serving on the Botkyrka municipal council as well as on the board of the Swedish Democrats’ local chapter, before he was forced to step back. Botkyrka in southern Stockholm is notorious for its “exclusion areas”, but the municipality also has predominantly Swedish residential buildings. The SD has nine out of 75 seats in the council.

On June 6, Stefan Andersen posted a post on his Facebook page where you can see a picture of a black mob climbing on a police car. Next to the picture of the raging crowd of blacks there was a picture of climbing monkeys, and underneath Stefan Andersen compared the behaviour with that of primates.

He was immediately criticized for the post, but replied, among other things, that it has nothing to do with race and that anyone who thinks it has, is just trying to score some cheap political points: “Now I want [Name] to explain why he thinks I call these blacks hooligans. When I mean that when you act like a monkey then you are not much better than a monkey.”

Andersen has been extremely reluctant to comment on the matter in the establishment media, but just said that he absolutely does not consider the post racist. He held the same view when Nya Tider approached him for an interview on June 11: “It is not the skin colour of the clinging people I criticize, but it is the behavior in itself that I think is ape-like.”

He said SD chairman Robert Stenkvist thought the post was a little too strong.

On Monday, June 8, a newspaper reported that Ebba Östlin, of Social Democratic Municipal Council in Botkyrka, demanded that Stefan Andersen abandon all his political assignments. She thought his post was “racist”. Östlin also told the newspaper that she wanted to gather all parties’ group leaders in the municipality to discuss Andersen’s post.

When his own party then withdrew support and asked him to resign, on June 8, Andersen chose to throw in the towel.

“During the past year I have known that it is simply not possible to discuss with people from the various ruling parties. Whatever is said, they will pull out the racist card instead of arguing.”

During the turbulent days he still received a lot of support, he says. “I have received a lot of support from people who have heard of it and who think that what I wrote was not at all racist, but that you should be able to call things by its proper name.”

Andersen’s view of the Swedish Democrats as a party has changed however. As far as his own political future is concerned, he says that he is still a member of the party and that he has no immediate plans to leave.

If his party excludes him, he may have to seek a new political family: “I like a lot of what AfS [Alternative for Sweden] stands for.”