People react at the end of a memorial service at Oslo Cathedral on Sunday, July 24, 2011, in the aftermath of the Friday attacks on Norway's government headquarters and a youth retreat in Oslo Emilio Morenatti / AP
In 2005, Norway's populist, far-right Progress Party ran election-campaign posters that featured a dark-skinned man pointing a gun at the camera and the slogan "The perpetrator is of foreign origin." Today, these posters carry a terrible irony: Anders Behring Breivik — a tall, blond, blue-eyed farmer not of foreign origin — massacred dozens of Norwegian schoolchildren on Friday, July 22, in what seems to have been a deranged attempt to spark a revolution against the influx of foreigners he felt was diluting Norway's heritage.
It is dangerous to look for answers in the mind of a madman. It does not necessarily reveal anything useful about a nation if one of its citizens murders under the banner of a particular ideology. But if Breivik's psychopathy is unique, in Norway and other Nordic countries his political beliefs are surprisingly widespread. It may seem shocking, but Scandinavia — for years a model of tolerance and cooperation and the sponsor of dozens of worthy international conferences and treaties — has become the latest European haven for xenophobic populist thought.
Norway's Progress Party, of which Breivik is a former member, won more than one-fifth of the national vote in the latest parliamentary election, in 2009. Last year, the Swedish Democrats became the first far-right party to enter the Swedish parliament when it captured nearly 6% of the vote despite a furor that erupted when local candidate Marie-Louise Enderleit posted a comment on Facebook that migrants should be shot in the head, put in a bag and sent back to their home countries. Denmark's Folkparty, which recently ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan "Give us Denmark back," secured 14% of the vote in a 2007 election and has since been an influential coalition partner in government. And the True Finns became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19% of the vote in elections in April.
"It is the end of an era," Anders Wildfeldt, lecturer in Nordic politics at the University of Aberdeen, says of the entrance of the far right into the Nordic political mainstream. Citing the success of xenophobic parties in other parts of Europe, Wildfeldt adds, "It's becoming increasingly inaccurate to discuss Scandinavian exceptionalism..."
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