On February 6, a young man stormed into an adult school in Sweden, gun in hand, rage in his voice. The students, mostly immigrants, had no time to run. Ten lives were lost. A clip from Sweden’s Channel 4 surfaced—a voice, raw with hatred, shouting: “Get out of Europe.” The police later confirmed what was already clear. This was an act of racist violence. This was xenophobia, locked and loaded.
Sweden has seen this before. Between 2010 and 2022, at least ten people were killed in seven violent school attacks. In 2015, a man wielding a sword entered a school in Trollhättan, where most students were immigrants. Teachers died that day, and the country mourned—but the grief never stopped the next attack. Sweden’s history is littered with these tragedies, each one feeding into the next.
In the early 1990s, Sweden’s economy stumbled, unemployment soared, and the politics of hate found new soil. Racism, which had always been there, suddenly grew bolder. In 1991, a newly formed far-right party, the New Democrats, entered Parliament with 6.7% of the vote. That same period saw the rise of the so-called ‘Laser Man,’ who stalked and shot immigrants, plunging the country into fear. And when he was finally caught, the racism that fueled him did not disappear. It merely changed shape.
In the 2000s, a new party emerged—the Sweden Democrats. It grew steadily, feeding off resentment, until it became the second-largest party in the 2022 elections. It now sits at the table of government, giving legitimacy to the very fears that once lurked in the dark. The message is clear: the politics of exclusion is no longer just an undercurrent. It is policy.
The man behind this latest massacre was thirty-five years old, from a middle-class Swedish family. He had struggled all his life—failing in school, failing in work, battling mental illness in a country where public healthcare has been gutted by neoliberal reforms. The system abandoned him long before he picked up a gun. But he did not turn his anger toward those who had cast him aside. He turned it toward those who looked different, spoke differently, those who had come seeking refuge in a country that had once promised safety.
Sweden has changed. The welfare state that once defined it has been chipped away, replaced by widening gaps between the privileged and the discarded. The political class, unwilling to face the deeper economic roots of social decay, has allowed xenophobia to become the easy answer. And as waves of refugees from war-torn countries arrived—from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile, Somalia, the Balkans—the anger of the forgotten Swedes found a scapegoat.
The far right, growing bolder by the year, offered an explanation, a simple lie wrapped in nationalist rhetoric: “They are taking what is yours.” And people believed it. They always do when they have nothing left to hold onto.
This latest killing spree did not happen in isolation. It is the result of decades of political choices—the dismantling of social protections, the legitimization of racist ideologies, the failures of integration, and the unchecked rise of Islamic fundamentalist groups that gave the right-wing another excuse to stoke fear. And so, Sweden is left in a vicious cycle, where the violence of exclusion begets more violence, where the politics of division feed on themselves.
The massacre in Örebro is not just another hate crime. It is a symptom of a country unraveling, of a society that has allowed fear and resentment to replace solidarity. And if history is any guide, it will happen again. The only question is how many more will have to die before Sweden admits the truth about itself.
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