Jimmie Åkesson’s cleaning job is never done

Jimmie Åkesson was recently interviewed about SD’s post-election ambitions. It turned out they were tall. Åkesson would like to see himself as the Minister of Justice in a future government alongside the moderates and Christian Democrats.

Obviously, he believes that it is time for the SD to be taken seriously as a political force. As a representative of the largest opposition party, according to the latest opinion poll, you shouldn’t have to stand and scratch your foot in Ulf Kristersson’s lobby.

A few days later, another SD scandal breaks out. And this time, the party leadership cannot shake the news that it is a representative of a peripheral party in distant times. Dennis Askling has had the role of group leader for SD in Haninge and has worked in the party’s parliamentary office. He has been considered a future name within the party and was sent to Haninge to clean up between problems there.

It is this person that Expressen’s David Baas confronted Tuesday with excerpts from a talk with a fellow party member. In the chat, Askling uses Nazi salute phrases like “Victory from hell!”, Wallows in outright racism, and talks about contacts with the pro-violence Nazi organization NMR.

When he realized that he had been exposed, he immediately dropped all political assignments. The SD party leadership will probably be satisfied with this. “Look, racists have no place in SD. Zero tolerance works.”

A party that has law and order as its profile issue must, of course, hold on to the security threats that Säpo points out against Sweden.

But that hardly convinces anyone. If Expressen had not revealed to Askling and everyone else before him that they have been “sent,” that is, confronted with racist statements by reporter David Baas, they would have continued to have confidence in representing the party.

Can’t Jimmie Åkesson just say that it’s Expressen’s job to do the cleanup work for SD? Zero tolerance must be a reasonable task for the party itself.

In 2016, it was revealed that SD had an employee at the Riksdag Chancellery who wrote debate articles under a false name and was flagged as a security threat. Now it turns out that they have also had an employee who shows an interest in violent extremists and Nazism.

It poses troubling questions to Jimmie Åkesson: How can a racially minded person feel at home in the SD Riksdag Chancellery? What about security thinking within SD? A party that has law and order as its profile issue must, of course, hold on to the security threats that Säpo points out against Sweden. The very idea that SD assumed the direction of the Ministry of Justice is dizzying in this context.

Åkesson should come down to earth. If you want to be treated as a serious politician and ministerial candidate, you must first clean up your own party. Really.