The Sweden Democrats, Nazi Music, and the Past
A new report commissioned by the Sweden Democrats itself confirms what many already knew: the party has roots in outright extremism.
During the so-called politicians’ week in Almedalen in 2017, the Sweden Democrats announced that they would commission a white paper about the party’s history and its connections to extremism.
It took several years before Tony Gustafsson, a relatively unknown historian of ideas and himself a former party member, was given the assignment. In 2022, the first part of the work was published. It dealt with the party’s founding back in 1988. Gustafsson pointed out that the party had strong roots in the movement Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish), a group that emerged in the late 1970s and was known above all for distributing leaflets with crudely racist rhetoric, and for promoting the idea that Sweden was in the process of being invaded and occupied.
Gustafsson also pointed out that fascists, National Socialists, and parts of the Nazi skinhead culture were represented in the party’s founding generation.
During this year’s politicians’ week in Almedalen, the second part of the white paper was presented. But as the author Ola Larsmo writes in Dagens Nyheter:
The most striking thing about the Sweden Democrats’ newly released white paper is that it is not a book. The two thick booklets, together totaling 800 pages, presented during Almedalen Week lack an ISBN number, place of printing, or publisher, and were copied in a mere 100 copies. There is no official digital version.
Nevertheless, a version of the report has appeared digitally. And Gustafsson has done extensive and thorough work. For those who already know something about the history of the Sweden Democrats, however, there is little that is surprising.
The party’s roots in Bevara Sverige Svenskt are well known. So too are its connections to outright far-right extremism, and not least to white power music in the 1990s. Stories such as the financial support from the extremely wealthy Belgian businessman, racist, and antisemite Bernard Mengal may be more obscure, but they are not new either.
To quote the Member of Parliament and party veteran Mattias Karlsson:
“It is almost overwhelming how many bad things occurred, how much poor judgment there was, and how much extremism one allowed to flourish around the party in different ways.”
That is true. It is overwhelming. But even that is old news.
Gustafsson’s report runs up to 2010, the year the Sweden Democrats first entered the Riksdag. Had it continued beyond that point, he could have included even more examples. In fact, only recently the magazine Expo reported on racism, hatred, and fantasies of violence in the Facebook group “Backa upp Richard Jomshof – stoppa islam i Sverige,” (Support Richard Jomshof – stop Islam in Sweden), a group run by a Sweden Democrat regional politician in Blekinge, Susanne Cederholm.
The Sweden Democrats’ relationship to their own past is not entirely… uncomplicated. In my book Hat: fortellinger om ytre høyre (“Hate: Stories of the Far Right”), I write, among other things, about a speech that Jimmie Åkesson gave during the campaign ahead of last year’s European elections. Here is a short excerpt from the book, in English translation:
The audience applauds and whistles as Åkesson takes the opportunity to drink some water. Then he delivers a whole series of accusations against the other parties: they understand that they are destroying Sweden, he says, but nevertheless support mass immigration and multiculturalism, “pampering” criminals, and ineffective climate measures that ruin the Swedish economy. “It is about ideology,” he later says in the speech, “about a few ideologically driven madmen who have taken the liberty and the right to experiment with our people, with our resources, and with our country.” He calls it “perverted humanism.”
Then Åkesson quotes his favorite band from his youth, Ultima Thule: “I hate you, you let it happen. Do you hear the lament in my song? When mistrust grows, your wandering goes too far. Power borrowed from your people— you have driven your dagger into their backs. You betrayed your country; your path is nothing but dirt and bitterness.”1
In the book I do not delve deeper into Ultima Thule. Since the band is also mentioned in Gustafsson´s report, and because the band´s history also says something about the party´s history, a more thorough look may still be in order.
Ultima Thule began, in a way, as a punk band back in the 1970s, initially under the name Rost and inspired by British punk bands such as the Sex Pistols. Soon, however, they were influenced by skinhead culture, and instead of sympathizing with anarchism they began to see themselves as Swedish patriots, as nationalists.
Through the older brother of band members Ulf and Bruno Hansen, they also came into contact with Bevara Sverige Svenskt. That was also how they got their name as well, following a suggestion from the leading BSS activist Leif Ericsson.
In classical and medieval literature, the concept “Ultima Thule” referred to a distant place far to the north, beyond the known world. For the band Ultima Thule, it was rather a reference to Sweden.
BSS also provided financial support to the band, enabling them to release their first single in 1985: “Sverige, Sverige, fosterland.”
It was advertised in BSS’s membership magazine Patrioten, where the writer Aake wrote that on the record one could sense the longing for “a new dawn. A dawn when the sun of social justice once again rises over a common fatherland, free from reactionaries, capitalists and parasites,” and that it should also be seen as a greeting to “society’s true revolutionaries, the Skinheads.”
The following year the band was interviewed by the British magazine White Noise, a magazine linked to the far-right British group National Front, which in many ways served as a model for BSS. “Through our music we can help preserve and develop our national identity,” Ulf Hansen said in the interview. He added that the band opposed immigration and supported BSS.
He also praised the Swedish skinhead scene, describing them as “warriors” who would not give up. “This is good because we will only national rebirth when people begin to fight back.”
Eventually Ultima Thule disbanded. In 1990 they reunited, and during the 1990s they also achieved success as leading figures of a musical genre described as viking rock: a mixture of rock, folk music, and lyrics with a nationalist message.
In 1991 they released their first album as an LP. The following year it was also released on CD in two different versions. One was released by their own label, Ultima Thule Records. The other came from the French label Rebelles Européens, which otherwise released a number of outright Nazi bands.
Their real breakthrough did not come until 1993, however. That year the band signed with the record company Mariann Grammofon, owned by the right-wing populist MP Bert Karlsson, a central figure in the party Ny Demokrati (New Democracy).
Ultima Thule shot up the bestseller charts, and the band’s third album, För fäderneslandet (For the Fatherland), went platinum. At the same time, they were surrounded by controversy. They were often accused of racism, not least after their links to Bevara Sverige Svenskt became widely known. At the same time they were also criticized from the far right, which accused them of betraying the cause merely to make money.
In a 1994 article in the nationalist magazine Ung Front, they were even accused of following an “extreme liberal line.” Readers of that magazine were instead recommended other music. One recommendation was the British Nazi punk musician Ian Stuart Donaldson, best known from the band Skrewdriver and also one of the founders of the neo-Nazi network Blood & Honour.
The band with the … interesting name Vit Aggression (White Agression) was also mentioned. It was a band with an openly white-power profile. One of its lyrics is described in Tony Gustafsson’s report as impossible to describe as anything other “than an orgy of explicit antisemitic themes,” thanks to lines such as:
Corruption, manipulation
Up out of Sodom they rose, Satan’s legion
To sink their claws into a Nordic tribe
And tear its throat, bringing it shame
The chosen people, a plague upon our world
They who in the Star of David bear the number of the beast
Its number in the Bible, a number of man
Whose power in the world has constantly grown2
In the years between Ultima Thule’s breakup and reunion, the Sweden Democrats had been established. As mentioned, BSS activists were central to this, and the aforementioned Leif Ericsson was actually one of the party’s first two spokesmen.
The man who later took over as party leader, Anders Klarström, had previously been involved with the Nordiska Rikspartiet (Nordic Reich Party), a Swedish National Socialist micro-party founded as far back as 1956. He had also spent time in the European Workers Party, a Swedish offshoot of the rather peculiar neo-fascist LaRouche movement.
The Sweden Democrats drew inspiration from, among others, the French Front National, described itself as democratic, and tried to give ultranationalism a more marketable expression than Bevara Sverige Svenskt had managed. Yet not much had actually changed. “Stop the invasion,” read stickers from the new party. From the party shop you could, among other things, buy a Swedish edition of the book The Political Soldier, written by the Briton Derek Holland, which was strongly influenced by the Romanian interwar fascist Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
In the same Ung Front magazine in which Ultima Thule was criticized, Klarström was interviewed. That was no coincidence. Ung Front was published by the Sweden Democrats’ youth organization.
This was how extreme the party was in the 1990s. Gustafsson writes:
Since the Sweden Democrats’ engagement in the white power music scene was ultimately a matter that must have involved the party leadership, the conclusion can only be that the leadership at least found it acceptable to support these expressions of racism, antisemitism and National Socialism—possibly even sympathized with them.
Despite accusations of betrayal, Ultima Thule became something of a soundtrack to the youth of some of the newer, younger members who joined the party from the mid-1990s onward.
From 1995 the party’s engagement in white power music was phased out. Thanks to their commercial success, Ultima Thule were more acceptable, and they also provided the soundtrack for a new generation of young party members. “You drain our soil, you drain the words of the skalds, you drain our body, the hearth of the kingdom of Svea; you drain it — feel the bite of our sword,”3 they sang, and it fit perfectly with these youths’ deeply hostile attitudes toward immigration.
During the Sweden Democrats’ party congress in Västerås in 2023, the band with roots in Bevara Sverige Svenskt stood on stage in front of a party with the same past.
And for many of the party veterans present, it was the sound of their own youth they heard from the greying viking-rockers. Several of them also tweeted enthusiastically about the concert. The MP Linus Bylund wrote that it was an honor to sing together with his idols from his youth. “The circle is complete,” wrote colleague Björn Söder, “I love these guys. They paved the way for our beloved party.”
He wasn´t wrong.
Even though the Sweden Democrats today describe themselves as “a social-conservative party with a nationalist outlook,” they have their roots in a radical nationalist subculture. That subculture both produced — and was itself shaped by — Ultima Thule, and by even more extreme bands.
Today, this may seem distant. When Ultima Thule stood on stage in Västerås, it was before members of Sweden’s second-largest party—a party that also supports the country’s center-right government.
Only a decade ago that seemed almost unthinkable, not least in Sweden. Today it is just one of many examples of far-right parties being invited into the political mainstream. Partly, this reflects the fact that opposition to immigration and an exclusionary nationalism have themselves become more respectable. But it has also often happened after far-right parties moderated themselves in order to become more acceptable, both to voters and to potential coalition partners.
The Sweden Democrats are a good example of this. Their long-time leader Jimmie Åkesson — who joined the party in 1995 — is today not only a polished populist but also the closest Swedish politics comes to a constant, after leading figures in all the other parties have been replaced. For years the party has also claimed to have zero tolerance for racism. At times this has functioned as a shield — for example when confronted with revelations about Sweden Democrat politicians linked to openly far-right extremist milieus, a recurring phenomenon. At other times it has functioned as a sword, used to remove internal challengers.
In the mid-2010s, for example, the party simply cut ties with its own youth organization, where leading figures had embraced ideas from the originally French ultranationalist movement Génération Identitaire. The identitarians’ ideas would hardly have raised eyebrows within the Sweden Democrats in the 1990s. More strikingly, however: In 2024, Åkesson himself adopted one of that movement’s central talking points: the claim that Europeans are being replaced. “My Europe builds walls—against illegal immigration, against Islamism and against population replacement,” he wrote in an article in Expressen.
That is in fact a sign that the party has taken a step to back towards its past.
During the politicians’ week in Almedalen, Jimmie Åkesson apologized to Swedish Jews for the party having previously acted in such a way that it “could be perceived as threatening and frightening for Jews in Sweden.”
More significant, perhaps, is what he did not apologize for.
Notes on the Antiliberal is written by Norwegian journalist Øyvind Strømmen. It will include articles on the radical right, extremism, conspiracy theories and other challenges to liberal democracy. This article from July 2025 is available in the original Norwegian at oyvindstrommen.substack.com.
In the original Swedish: Jag hatar er, ni lät det ske. Hör ni klagan i min sång. Når misstron gror, er irrfärd alltför lång. Makt til låns ifrån ert folk, i dess rygg ni satt er dolk. Ni svek ert land, er väg blott smuts och smolk.
In the original Swedish: Korruption, manipulation / Upp ur Sodom de steg, Satans legion / För att slå sina klor i en nordisk stam / Och slita dess strupe, bringa den skam / Det utvalda folket, en pest av vår värld / De i davidsstjärnan bestens nummer bär / Dess tal i bibeln, ett människotal / Vars styrka i världen ständigt växt
In the original Swedish: Ni tär på vår jord, ni tär på skalders ord, ni tär på vår kropp, Svea rikes härd, ni tär, känn bettet i vårt svärd.