FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: How Sweden’s multicultural dream went fatally wrong.

Barely a week passes in Sweden today without a teenager being arrested for such a hit, keeping Salihu extremely busy, and the public in the grip of a national crisis like no other before it. A softly-spoken former tabloid journalist, the 41-year-old could be a character from a Scandi-noir novel, shining light in society’s darker corners. The body count on his beat, though, is far higher than any Stieg Larsson novel, and holds out little prospect of a satisfactory ending.

For the story he has pursued for the last decade is, in effect, one giant, unsolved murder mystery: why has Sweden, long the envy of the rest of Europe for its peace and prosperity, suddenly seeing so many gangland killings?

Why, in a land that prides itself on welcoming migrants, are so many gang members from migrant communities? And is it Swedish society that is the ultimate culprit, or the migrant communities themselves?

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So what has gone wrong? Part of the blame, Salihu says, is down to the social blights common to most of Europe’s more impoverished multi-racial neighbourhoods. Joblessness and discrimination limit many youngsters’ sense of prospects. TV gang dramas, meanwhile, often “highlight the flashy parts of gang life – money, respect, power – but leave out the trauma, manipulation, and tragic consequences.”

Yet the sense of failure is all the more acute in Sweden, long an open door compared to other European nations. Ever since the 1960s, when it first styled itself as a humanitarian superpower, it has taken in those fleeing trouble abroad, be it Americans fleeing the Vietnam war draft, Soviet dissidents, or Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the 1990s came refugees from the Balkans, and in the last decade asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived. Anxious not to create “parallel societies”, Swedish governments have long funded social integration programmes alongside the waves of migration.

Earlier: Nearly two thirds of convicted rapists in Sweden are migrants or second generation immigrants.

Ten years ago it would be unthinkable that El Salvador would be considered safer than Sweden.

But now that has happened.

Malmö is now ranked as dangerous as Baghdad.

There has been almost daily bombing attacks in Sweden.

Something went very wrong in my home country.

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) April 10, 2025