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. 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.
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”. The view was echoed by Asplund.
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