Lögnare review

Fast forward a couple of years, and the SD are still very popular among certain sections of the Swedish electorate for their blatant racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric, which they share with a number of other similar parties across Europe, such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, and the governing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party in Italy. 

Daniel Andersson was a young journalist working for Swedish TV channel TV4 on a programme called Kalla Fakta (‘Hard Facts’). His boss Emil Hellerud had done some research on troll factories, and suspected that there might be one operating within the Sweden Democrats. To try and ascertain whether or not this was true, Hellerud came up with the idea of infiltrating the Sweden Democrats; and discovering what was afoot. Hellerud approached Andersson with the idea of him being the infiltrator. Andersson agreed. He started putting feelers out among young people at a meeting of the national conservative student organisation, the Swedish Conservative Association, and lets them know that he would like to enter politics, or rather Sweden Democrat politics, to be more precise.  

He made some very useful contacts, and eventually, he was offered a job at Riks, a web-TV news channel, that share a building with the SD’s communications department. Later on, he found work at the actual communications department itself, run by Joakim Wallerstein who, it turns out, is a rather prickly character, albeit a very successful one. Reading the book, you can tell that he had his suspicions about Andersson. During his time at the communications department, Andersson was leading a double life, unable to tell some of his closest friends what he was doing. He even suffered from panic attacks; his colleagues at Kalla Fakta, whom he updated regularly on his progress, did not realise the incredibly stressful situation he had put himself in by agreeing to undertake this ‘assignment’. While some of his young co-workers at the department seemed to be very nice, it should not be forgotten what they were doing and who they were working for.

Eventually, Andersson hit the jackpot and unearthed comprehensive evidence of the existence of the troll factory, but once he and his colleagues found what they had been looking for all those weeks, the difficult part came: to try and leave his job without arousing anybody’s suspicions, by making up a back story about not being able to manage the workload he was expected to do. When Kalla Fakta later went public with the revelations concerning the troll factory in May 2024, it shocked the Swedish political arena. It became a huge story in the country at the time and revealed many uncomfortable truths about the SD and what their communications department had been doing: producing propaganda such as clips spreading falsehoods against prominent Swedish members of parliament from rival political parties, and creating a speech by Jimmie Åkesson in Arabic telling Muslim migrants to go home, just to give two examples. However, as a result of his activities, Andersson faced a huge backlash, including threats against him and being called a traitor to his country.

Andersson is a very brave individual for what he did; and this is a very important book. Hopefully it will find a receptive readership in the rest of Scandinavia and beyond: in other countries with their own populist and right-wing parties, who at times make one believe that the political clock has been turned back to the 1930s.