Swedish Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson of the Social Democrats has labelled a new European Parliament election poster campaign by the populist Sweden Democrats as being in the “spirit” of former Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
The populist Sweden Democrats (SD) launched their new campaign in subway stations earlier this week as a series of posters that contain the old German imperial black, white and red flag with the caption, “It is not the first time that the Socialists help Germany take over Europe,” Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
Minister Johansson took to Twitter to express his outrage at the campaign saying the SD, “conducts pure falsification of history in the spirit of Goebbels. When Hitler made himself a dictator in Germany 1933, there was a party that voted against: the Social Democrats.”
“Thousands of Social Democrats and trade unionists were exiled or killed in Nazi concentration camps,” he added.
While Johansson was referring to the Social Democrats in Germany, the history of the Social Democrats in Sweden and their relationship with the Nazi regime was much different. During the period from 1934 to 1976, the Social Democrats initiated a policy of racial purity eugenics, beliefs similar to the Nazi regime, with the government later forced to pay compensation to victims.
During the Second World War, Sweden, led by the Social Democrats, remained a neutral country in the conflict, although many Jews from both Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway found refuge in Sweden during the war.
The Jewish Youth League in Sweden also reacted negatively to the SD poster saying that it was, “exploitation of the Holocaust for political purposes.”
Mattias Karlsson, group leader for the Swedish Democrats, however, defended the campaign stating, “We want to raise a debate on the EU’s development and that it is obvious that Germany and France want to build a new empire at the expense of the nation-states.”
Despite the criticisms, the Sweden Democrats are set to radically grow their vote in this month’s election, with some polls showing that they might double their result from the previous European Parliament elections.
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