Power hungry divisive politicians need to heal the country

The country is being taken over. Your people are being replaced. Your neighbours are invaders. Repeat those claims often enough and they cease to sound like campaign rhetoric. For a small number of vulnerable young men, especially those already drawn into online spaces that glorify violence, they can begin to sound like a duty to act.

Most people who hear ugly political language will never hurt anyone. No honest argument can draw a straight line from one speech to one violent act. Radicalisation has many ingredients, including isolation, perceived injustice, mental ill-health, fascination with previous attackers and a personal appetite for brutality. But complexity is not innocence. The evidence does not support the comforting fiction that leaders can describe democratic life as a war for national survival without affecting the people listening.

In three survey experiments, political communication researcher Nathan Kalmoe found that even mild violent metaphors increased support for political violence among people with aggressive traits, with especially strong reactions among young adults. A later experiment found that racially inflammatory elite speech made highly prejudiced respondents more likely to regard discriminatory behaviour as socially acceptable. The effect grew when other political leaders appeared to tolerate the language.

The pattern is not confined to a laboratory. A 2023 study in the American Economic Journal found that Donald Trump’s tweets about Muslims predicted increases in xenophobic posts by his followers, news coverage about Muslims and anti-Muslim hate crimes on the following days. Research in Germany has similarly linked politicians’ threatening statements about refugees to a short-term rise in attacks. A recent academic review concludes that the influence on violence remains difficult to isolate, but that the emboldening effect on public prejudice is supported by substantial evidence.

Sweden’s Security Service describes the other half of the danger. Violent propaganda reaches young people on social media, gaming platforms and closed forums, where violence is normalised and the threshold for using it is lowered. Säpo says the far-right attack threat primarily involves lone young actors radicalised online, while conspiracy theories about racial survival and fantasies of hastening social collapse recur in those environments.

That is why talk of a ‘people replacement’, invasion or a country being stolen is not just colourful language about migration. It supplies a radicalising story with a homeland, an enemy and a deadline. Some citizens become occupiers. Political opponents become traitors. Compromise becomes surrender. Democratic patience begins to look like cowardice. A lonely and angry young man does not enter the internet carrying a complete ideology; power-hungry adults are helping to write one for him.

This is not an argument for suppressing debate. Politicians may say that immigration has been too high, integration has failed, crime is intolerable or policy must change sharply. Democracy requires room for those claims. It also requires moral precision. A failed policy is not a stolen nation. A neighbour is not an invader. A political opponent is not an enemy combatant. The line between restriction and dehumanisation is perfectly visible to anyone willing to see it.

Sweden needs leaders who lower the temperature without denying real problems. Parties should renounce replacement myths and the vocabulary of invasion. They should present evidence, name workable remedies and stop treating fear as an inexhaustible electoral resource. Platforms must disrupt communities that glorify attackers. Schools and local services need the means to recognise violent fixation early. Young men must hear that their country is a shared civic home, not a racial inheritance guarded by whoever shouts loudest.

Power hunger makes division tempting because fear creates loyal voters and easy enemies. Healing requires more courage. Politicians cannot tell young men every day that their country has been conquered and then assume none will feel called to reconquer it. Sweden will heal when power stops merchandising siege and starts defending our common life.

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