Jimmie Åkesson woke the bear that was sleeping

ÖREBRO. Go and vote. That was the call from Örebro mosque when the election campaign was filled with anti-Muslim statements. At the same time, left-wing politicians like Nadja Awad knocked on thousands of doors and promised frozen rents. Homeless people flocked to V in Sweden's vulnerable areas. – Jimmie Åkesson awakened the bear that was sleeping, says Vivallabon Yonis Abokor. Nadja Awad can barely move in Vivalla without fans approaching. – Is that you? It's you! I love you! says 20-year-old folk high school student Amira Hussein. The scarf flutters as she throws it around the neck of the 15-year-old parliament member. – I follow you on Tiktok, and I voted for you. You are a wonderful person, I hope you understand that. You speak for all of us. And you are so beautiful, so lovely! Amira Hussein was born and raised in Sweden, just like Nadja Awad. Her parents immigrated from Yemen, Nadja Awad from Egypt. Amira Hussein has recently discovered how heated the conversation about immigrants can become on social media. – I saw this with Jimmie, he wants to send people out. And then some SD clip, like: "You don't want to see this on the bus," about immigrant youth who act badly, as they say. And then I have seen Tiktokers who go to poor areas and take pictures of maybe a Somali family with many children and make it look bad, do you understand? And I notice immediately: These are people who want me ill. Amira Hussein first thought about voting for Magdalena Andersson. The leader of S seems wise and kind, she thinks. – But then I started following you and Nooshi – and my heart just melted. You say such good things. And the right-wing people just boil over with you! Nadja Awad laughs. She sees her young Tiktok followers as little siblings. – Darling, she says to Amira Hussein. CAFÉ VIVALLA Four Somali men light up when they enter the supermarket's cafe. It is the day after the election and they have seen the Social Democrats' parliament member. – You have fought so hard. We want to say thank you. And congratulations! Nadja Awad smiles at the men. – I am the one who should thank you. You have also fought! What have they done? – They have had a fantastic engagement to get our older people in the area to vote. To get people to actually go and vote, says Nadja Awad. The four friends sit at a cafe table. Mohamed Abdi, Yonis Abokor, Asad Bile, and Ali Abdi sit on several keys for those who want to understand why the Swedish election in 2026 turned out as it did. In the previous election, a couple of them voted for the Social Democrats. No one voted at all. Now they have basically become campaign workers for the Left Party, and have helped the party rush like a rocket. In Vivalla, their support tripled and reached almost 45 percent. V is now as big as S here. Together, the red parties have the entire 90 percent of voter support. Why did so many Vivallans go from the sofa to the ballot box? Yonis Abokor, a 62-year-old man with salt-and-pepper beard, has his answer clear: – Jimmie Åkesson. He saw SVT's final debate and heard the words from the SD party leader: – This could be the first election in Sweden where the Muslim immigration we have had has been the deciding factor in a parliamentary election. Suck that up, said Jimmie Åkesson. At Café Vivalla, Yonis Abokor says: – Jimmie helped us there. He awakened the bear that was sleeping! The friends around the table laugh. When the laughter subsides, the pain is noticed. "Imported vote livestock," calls Jimmie Åkesson's party colleague Kent Ekeroth in a Sveriges Radio interview. Ekeroth, who is the regional councilor for the SD in Dalarna, believes that many immigrants should not have received citizenship and voting rights, and specifically points to Muslims "with the hitch." – Livestock? That is so crude. I don't understand how politicians can express themselves like that, says Ali Abdi, a man in his fifties who ordered pancakes with cream and jam. The election campaign has been filled with anti-Muslim statements. The SD wanted to ban hijabs and made Richard Jomshofs anti-Islamic "Kafir" a part of his election campaign. "Stop being Muslims," the SD leadership said when the DN asked about his message to ordinary, peaceful believers. Here in Örebro, the climate has become extra toxic, explains Ali Abdi, because the populist Markus Allard from the fast-growing Örebro Party has long spoken negatively about Somalis. In his podcast, Allard has spoken about child restrictions for residents with roots in Somalia, and floated an idea: Force women to take birth control pills to get social assistance. – He talks about us as parasites, those who sit and have coffee outside Willys and don't work. It is offensive. Ali Abdi eats his pancakes in a gray shirt with a bus company logo on the chest. – I am a bus driver. We work. We pay taxes. Then we can have coffee when we are free, like everyone else. That doesn't mean we sit here waiting for benefits, he says. Ali Abdi applauded when a group of 20 Somali bus drivers in Skaraborg refused to drive buses with SD advertisements. "Do you miss Mogadishu? The return subsidy will help you home," the SD text said. – We come here. We adapt to Swedish society. And then we get that in our faces, says Ali Abdi. But the SD is not alone in linking immigrants to problems. In the previous election campaign, Somalis felt singled out when Magdalena Andersson said she did not want to see "Somali towns." Since then, the S leader's recurring talk about tight migration has caused friction even within their own ranks. From Tidö, the anti-immigration drums sound even louder. The parliamentary member Fredrik Kärrholm (M) has even blamed the election loss on immigrants. "Immigration to Sweden has not only brought crime, social problems and unemployment – now the government that has successfully started to solve these problems has been voted out because of the immigration itself," writes Fredrik Kärrholm in the British conservative newspaper The Spectator. The Left Party's Nadja Awad emphasizes that "all Swedish citizens' votes are equally valuable." – "We do not fight immigrants – we fight poverty," I have repeated as a mantra in the election campaign. And I notice that people see a calm in people when they hear that. A calm? – Yes. People think: Okay, they are not against us. Other parties are against us. The government has only talked about us as problems. But you don't. Vivalla has around 7,000 residents, most with foreign backgrounds. Common professions are driver, cleaner, teaching assistant, cook, and nursing assistant. Vivalla is also one of the 19 Swedish residential areas that the police classify as particularly vulnerable. According to Nadja Awad, in practice, all parties except V and S have given up on Vivalla. – I have not seen anyone from Tidö campaigning here. The Liberals' Wilhelm Sundman tells the DN that he has indeed been in Vivalla, at an election debate. However, the L party has not had the resources to knock on doors. Neither in Vivalla nor anywhere else. Nadja Awad and her party colleagues have shifted the door-knocking on their side. This year, the left-wing politicians have knocked on about 10,000 doors in Örebro, compared to 600 in the 2022 election. In Stockholm, the Moderates have accused the Left Party of aggressive and dishonest campaigning. Elisabeth Hellström, chairwoman for M in Tensta-Rinkeby, accuses the Left Party's campaign workers of "disinformation" and for threatening and scaring voters into voting for the Left Party. – The Moderates are just bad losers. We have worked a long time to build up trust among people in Swedish suburbs, says Nadja Awad. Facts.Nadja Awad Age: 35 years Family: Husband. Mother, father, and three siblings. Lives: Varberga in Örebro. An area that the police classify as vulnerable, not far from Vivalla. Does: Member of Parliament for V from Örebro. Elected in the 2022 election when her popularity allowed her to pass the party's then first name on the list. Occupation: Teacher of Swedish and history. Background: Born in Kumla. Her mother and father moved here from Egypt in search of a better life. Her father worked as a bus driver and is now a traffic manager in Örebro County. Her mother was a baker, but is now retired. Social Media: Has 45,000 followers on Instagram and 42,000 on Tiktok. As a comparison, the Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar has 122,000 Instagram followers and 67,000 Tiktok followers. She lives herself in Varberga, a so-called vulnerable area. – When we knock on doors, we talk about future hope and how we concretely want to make life better for people. And we are happy! I think that it is important. A smile can be political currency. After Jimmie Åkesson's Muslim warning on SVT, Nadja Awad filmed a clip for Tiktok and Instagram. She smiled broadly at the camera and stepped forward with determined steps. "A Muslim about to vote," she wrote and put the clip to the song "Pump it" by Black Eyed Peas. It quickly got over a quarter of a million views. ÖREBRO CENTER In the 2026 election, it became clear: Many of Sweden's Muslims are truly tired of being suspected of their religion. The Örebro mosque campaigned in Vivalla. – During Friday prayer, our imams urged everyone to go and vote. Not for a specific party. The important thing was to get people to the polling stations, says Khalid Ibrahim, a board member of the congregation. Why has this been important just this year? – We have seen statements from politicians about not being able to be Muslim and Swedish at the same time. And the whole societal climate... It reminds of Grotesco's old satire "The Fault of the Pogrom" – but now it is all the fault of the immigrants. The 41-year-old Khalid Ibrahim is a doctor at Örebro University Hospital. He came to Sweden as a five-year-old, with parents who fled the war in Eritrea. We meet him between two work shifts, near the hospital. The SD election advertisements still line the streets: "Learn Swedish, get a job, adapt. Or go home!" – As a Muslim and a Swede, I must say: I have never felt so unwanted in the country that I see as mine, says Khalid Ibrahim. To be able to express themselves more freely, he asks to be allowed to speak as a private person, not as a mosque representative. Khalid Ibrahim hopes that the moderate parties will leave the SD cooperation and "return to decency," he says. – I think that parties like M, KD and L are fundamentally decent. During Göran Hägglund's time as leader of KD, he visited mosques and tried to win voters there. The Moderates' official election slogan "Flyter" from 2010 had the text line: "Build a mosque, baby, build three, baby." Khalid Ibrahim hopes that they will now disconnect themselves from the anti-Muslim train. – Maybe they can become real moderates or liberals again. Not those who have to bow to what is said at the very far right. CAFÉ VIVALLA The rents are too high, many in Vivalla think. – I pay 17,000 a month for our fifth, says the bus driver Ali Abdi. – I pay 13,500 for a four, says Mohamed Abdi, who is a ward in adult psychiatry. With his 27 years being the youngest of the friends at the cafe table. – I voted for the first time this year. Previously I haven't really seen that my vote matters. For Mohamed Abdi and Ali Abdi, it was the Left Party's promise to freeze rents in public utility that led them to vote for V. – The government has focused on the rich. The Left Party focuses on us, says Mohamed Abdi. The Left Party has also focused a lot on Palestine in its campaign, with Palestinian flags and Palestinian crescent patterns around the V logo. "Free Palestine," it says in Nadja Awad's bio on Instagram. They used the word genocide early on to describe Israel's warfare in Gaza. Has Palestine played a role for Mohamed Abdi and Ali Abdi when they voted for the Left Party for the first time? Both shake their heads. – I focus more on the economic situation, says Mohamed Abdi. The Left Party's election campaign has been filled with scandals, where the Palestinian engagement among several candidates turned into pure antisemitism. The party has been forced to completely drop 38 candidates after Expressen revealed that they spread anti-Semitism or support for terrorist groups. In the film that the left-wing parliamentarian from Örebro shared, the "Jewish" man claims that they bake bread with blood and sell the meat to butchers: "Kilograms of meat that we grind into sausage and hamburgers." At Café Vivalla, Nadja Awad and her party colleague Jesper Levin ask the DN: What do they think about the blatant antisemitism from the woman who was on their own V-list? – We were shocked, says Jesper Levin, who lives in Vivalla and is V's first name in Örebro. Nadja Awad continues: – She no longer represents us. That is how we take responsibility as a parliament party. We should speak well of all the people who live in Sweden. – The party's process of finding candidates must be better managed, says Jesper Levin. EU parliamentarian Alice Teodorescu Måwe (KD) accuses V of surfing an anti-Semitic wave. "It is now clear that mobilizing anti-Semitic voters with foreign backgrounds has been fruitful," she wrote on X after V's election success. – I think our voters deserve more respect than being lumped together as people with bad values, counters Nadja Awad.