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The striking photograph showed a lone Black woman, her fist raised, standing in the path of hundreds of uniformed neo-Nazis on parade in 2016, and it made headlines across the globe.
At the time, it was held up as a symbol of the resistance to the far right. But 10 years on, as Sweden gears up for elections in which the far right is expected to emerge as the second most-voted-for party, the woman in the photo sees it as a sign of the bewildering change that has gripped the Scandinavian country.
“Ten years ago, people would say, ‘Oh we dislike the far right, the Sweden Democrats, we despise Nazis,’” said Tess Asplund, 52. “And now, they’ve become normalised. It’s like, what happened?”
Her comments hint at the recent reshaping of Swedish politics, where the far right – once a pariah – has steadily marched into the halls of power. “I’m sad, afraid and ashamed of Swedish citizens,” said Asplund in an interview at a cafe in central Stockholm. “It’s pure racism.”
Ahead of a general election on 13 September, polls suggest that the centre-left opposition has a lead over the ruling rightwing coalition, meaning a change of government could be on the cards.
But the Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots, is expected to garner the second-most votes in the country. In the 2022 elections, it also came second, paving the way for it to play a supporting role in a minority-run coalition.
The party has long been dogged by accusations of harbouring violent racists and swastika-wearing Nazi sympathisers. It has used its leverage in government to consistently target migrants, including asylum seekers, as well as Muslims, ushering in ultra-restrictive migration policies and a discourse that routinely disparages the millions of people from around the world who have made Sweden their home and seek to contribute to it.
Earlier this year, the Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, mused that if his four-party coalition won the upcoming election, the far right could enter government, in what was seen as a watershed moment for Swedish politics.
It was a sharp contrast to the Sweden that Aspland had stood up for on 1 May 2016. She and scores of others had travelled to the central Swedish city of Borlänge to rally against a planned march by the Nordic Resistance Movement, one of the country’s largest neo-Nazi groups.
As she faced off against them, her act of defiance was caught on camera by photographer David Lagerlöf of Expo, the anti-racism foundation in Stockholm.
It soon went viral, with Swedish media likening it to another iconic image of resistance: a 1985 photo in which photographer Hans Runesson captured a woman taking aim at a skinhead with her handbag in the south-western city of Växjö.
Media requests poured in from around the world. In Sweden, people began stopping Asplund on the streets, thanking her for her gesture, though she also grappled with a stream of online harassment and death threats on her home telephone line.
For Asplund, who has spent much of her life campaigning against racism, it was a sobering frontline encounter with the far-right spectrum of Sweden, which ranges from the extremist Nordic Resistance Movement, which in 2024 was designated as a terror group by the US, to the Sweden Democrats, who have long worked to make over their image.
A 2023 study noted that the presence of the two groups, both of which have shared roots in their militant opposition to immigration, probably works to bolster their causes by keeping issues of immigration and integration on Sweden’s political agenda.
Or, in the words of Mohammad Aluaudt Allah, a Syrian refugee who was kicked unconscious on a street in central Stockholm last year, the politicians who blame immigrants for all of the country’s issues have “created a sense of impunity for violent Nazi groups”.
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“They may feel that they are being given permission to exercise their hatred and attack us,” he told newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
The view was echoed by Asplund. “The Nordic Resistance Movement, they’re kind of small now, we don’t hear so much about them any more,” she said. “They don’t have to be big because Sweden Democrats are big, so they’ve got people doing their work in the government. The Nazis are in the shadows.”
The resulting rhetoric had then been amplified by some in media, she said, pointing to those who had uncritically swallowed the far right’s blaming of all social and economic ills on migration.
What had emerged was a hardened Sweden, one where, for example, dozens of young people who had lived their whole lives in Sweden had been deported to their parents’ countries of birth after they failed to meet the increased earnings thresholds for migrants. “Thirty years ago, we would be on the street fighting against this. Now it’s like, ‘That’s sad for him or her.’ It’s a shift that really scares me,” she said.
“If Olof Palme were alive today, he would turn over in his grave,” she added, citing the assassinated former leader of Sweden’s Social Democratic party, who is credited with many of the progressive policies long associated with Sweden, from the robust social welfare system to a pro-refugee discourse that welcomed those escaping dictatorships and war.
She noted, however, that her disappointment and shame did not extend to everyone in Sweden. “We are many, many people here fighting for human rights and against racism,” she said.
But in some ways, the photo – hailed in 2016 for capturing one of the conflicts of our time – seemed to pit Palme’s Sweden against the march of the far right.
In the years since, Asplund despaired that it may have been the far right who had emerged victorious.
“I’m afraid and heartbroken because when I speak to people they’re like, ‘Oh for God’s sake, forget that. It was 20 years ago that there were Nazis and skinheads, now it’s gone,’” she said. “They’ve normalised it. It’s not my safe Sweden any more, it’s not the Sweden that I’m used to.”
