Now a Nazi salute is 'cool': young Swedes fall into arms of far right

Driving through western Sweden, through pine forests dotted with elk warning signs, Lars Stiernelöf says he has noticed a worrying trend among boys.

- By Miranda Bryant

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, after which the US president’s top adviser and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, gave two fascist-style salutes, there has been a rise in children using the Nazi salute in schools in Värmland.

“They don’t do it as a type of homage to Hitler but because Musk did it,” says the sociologist, who works to counter violent extremism in the county where the Swedish Nazi party was founded 100 years ago.

While he says that the number of children engaging in this behaviour is small, it is evidence of the need for early intervention when it comes to the recruitment of young boys into far-right groups. “It is a violent message, and it can also be very serious if they’re drawn in. It should definitely be taken seriously.”

Far-right extremism has long been present in Sweden, but – as in parts of Europe and the US – the last few years have seen a dramatic shift in the dominant groups, their structure, activities and recruitment.

The number of active groups in the Swedish far right is at its highest level since 2008, according to a new report by Expo, a Swedish anti-racism institute. After several years in decline, last year saw a rise in the number of groups “attracting a new generation of young men who have lost faith in democracy”. Violence, it reports, plays an increasingly important role – “both rhetorically and in actual acts of violence”.

Sweden’s largest neo-Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), is not the force it once was. Its activities were heavily impacted by being designated a terror group by the US last year, meaning any US-based assets were frozen and it was blocked from the US financial system. It has also struggled to recruit younger men.

But a multitude of smaller, more agile and, to many, more invisible groups have emerged, using racist memes and violent videos to fish for new members on platforms like TikTok before the conversation moves on to private platforms.