Sweden's Government Won its War with Gangs. Voters Punished Them For It

Sweden. For a long time saying that word conjured images of IKEA, IKEA, ABBA, and social democracy at its finest. People were rich, taxes were high, immigrants were welcome, and the country was just really, really safe.

Barring the odd assassination of a prime minister, murder was rare, street crime was minimal, and people trusted their neighbours. But do you notice how we open that? For a long time.

Because the Sweden we described there is no longer the stereotype. Over the 2010s, Sweden went from being a bastion of safety to one of the most unsafe nations in Europe. Gun crimes, which at one point were a rarity, skyrocketed.

Grenade attacks became so frequent that they even got their own bloody Wikipedia page. And gangs grew so powerful that wars between them could paralyse towns. For a while it seemed like this was going to be Sweden's new normal.

And then Prime Minister Ulf Christensen's right-wing government did what seemed impossible. It stemmed the bleeding. Between 2022 and 2026, shootings began to drop from their peak, approaching something like the Sweden of old.

Yet instead of being rewarded for it, Christensen was punished. His right-wing coalition lost the recently concluded elections, and on the 17th of September he announced that he would be stepping down as Prime Minister.

All of which naturally raises two interconnected questions: How did Prime Minister Christensen stem the tide, and why on earth was he punished for it?

A national crisis? Now, before we answer either of those questions, we need to discuss just how bad things had gotten in Sweden. At the turn of the millennium, Sweden ranked 18th out of 22 European countries for fatal shootings near the bottom of the table, which is roughly where most people would expect it to be.

And then came the 2010s and everything changed. In 2011, there were only 17 gun-related murders in the entire nation. Not in one city.

Not in a small village. In the whole world. To put that into perspective, in 2024, the most recent year for which we have data, New York State recorded around 896 firearm deaths, of which around 360 were homicides.

And New York is one of America's safest states. Now, obviously, this comparison is a bit apples to pretzels. New York State's population is 9 million people bigger than Sweden's, and Americans love their guns almost as much as Swedes love their flat-pack furniture.

But you get the idea. In Sweden, at the dawn of the 2010s, someone getting shot dead was a spectacularly rare event. And then things started to change.

By 2018, the number of gun murders in Sweden had risen to 42 out of 274 confirmed shootings. By 2020, it was 47 dead from more than 360 shootings. The peak came in 2022, when there were 63 gun deaths from 391 confirmed shootings.

That year, guns were responsible for more than half of all homicides being committed in the country. That year, the Swedish government estimated that the country had a gun homicide rate of roughly four deaths per million people, against a European average of just 1.6.

Even more damning is the fact that Sweden was the only EU country where the number of fatal shootings was increasing.

And it's not just shootings. Bomb and grenade attacks were also on the rise, from 162 incidents in 2018 to 257 the following year.

Now, if you're watching this in the United States or in Latin America, you might be thinking, "What's the big deal about 63 gun deaths in a year?" Cities like Chicago, Guayaquil, and Bogota can get to that number in a matter of weeks, if not days.

However, Europe has historically been much safer than the US or Latin America. So Sweden's numbers really stand out, especially when countries like Denmark had 18 gang-related shootings and four deaths from gang violence in 2022, the same year that Sweden hit its peak.

All of this raises an interesting question: How did these things become so bad that the Wall Street Journal dubbed the nation the "Gun Murder Capital of Europe"?

Well, let's start with the guns. For the better part of two decades, Balkan arms traffickers have kept Swedish criminal networks stocked with assault rifles, pistols, and grenades — leftovers from the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, or GITOC, reported that AK-47s cost anywhere between $4,000 and $6,000, while pistols could cost around $2,000 and grenades went for as little as $150, although they were often given out for free with the purchases of other weapons.

By the AK, you get the grenade for free. Although most of the guns originate from the Balkans, there isn't a single cartel that runs the whole operation. Instead, the guns flow into Sweden in small numbers, which makes the whole operation extremely difficult for the police to shut down.

These weapons get into Sweden either through the sea — because customs agents can only inspect a small percentage of container traffic — or over land. Most of the hardware that comes in over land does so across the Øresund Bridge from Denmark, hidden in cars, buses, even loaves of bread.

The smugglers had a particularly easy time moving the guns into the country because, for years, the nation's customs agency was directed to prioritize drugs and alcohol over guns in order to combat organized crime.

Which is an interesting choice. But the guns are only part of the story. In 2020, European police, cracked EncroChat, an encrypted phone network that was used by organized crime groups across the continent.

This was such an important breakthrough that the UK alone arrested more than 700 people as a result of the operation. In Sweden, the information was used to arrest hundreds of the country's most senior gang figures. The intelligence pool from their phones also revealed that Sweden's gang problem was much larger than previously believed.

The police discovered that there were at least 84 separate drug trafficking gangs, which were importing about 150 tons of drugs annually. That's more than 10 times what the police had estimated. On paper, the arrests that followed these revelations were a win.

They proved that law enforcement agencies were capable of keeping up with criminal organizations, even when those organizations used cutting-edge technology. However, because of the law of unintended consequences, these arrests ended up being something of a net negative.

They hollowed out the leadership of Sweden's underworld all at once, and somebody still had to run the drug corners that those bosses left behind.

The old guard were replaced by dozens of loosely organized junior offshoots, mainly made up of really young members who were a lot more willing to fight over territory than their older counterparts. And when we say really young, we mean really young.

Some of the foot soldiers left behind were as young as 13, and as anyone who used to be a teenager can tell you, that is a really bad age for someone to be given a gun and a set of perceived enemies.

Some of the violence that happened during this period wasn't even tied to territory. Instead, it was just a bunch of armed kids desperately trying to assert their dominance over their peers. And these kids didn't have anything to fear from getting caught.

Sweden's criminal justice system was extremely lenient on young offenders, with the age of criminal responsibility set at 15. This meant that a 13 or 14-year-old could carry a gun, plant a bomb, or pull a trigger and suffer few serious consequences. Even the older teenagers were often given a slap on the wrist.

The Financial Times reports that a 17-year-old would still only have 7 months in prison for a shooting, compared to 8 years for an 18-year-old. Gang leaders quickly realized that they could recruit children. And those kids recruited even more kids, which only made things worse.

In 2024, Swedish authorities estimated that around 1,700 children were members of gangs. Another factor that we have to talk about is immigration. Whenever conversations around immigration come up, especially regarding Europe, the resulting conversation tends to wind up being as nuanced and subtle as WrestleMania.

So we want to approach this one with as much care as possible. Because of its reputation for being an open and welcoming nation, Sweden took in a lot more immigrants than most other European states.

However, those immigrants often lived in poverty because of several factors, including extremely restrictive labor laws, which created a wide disparity between the number of employed native-born Swedes and the number of employed immigrants.

A lot of immigrants chose to join these gangs because they felt like they didn't have other options. Now, we aren't saying this to justify young people, and we are not saying this to justify people deciding to pick up a gun.

There are millions of immigrants around the world who, even in the most difficult circumstances, decide that they'd much rather work an honest job than shoot someone for money.

Rather, we're trying to explain why the gangs looked like an attractive option for disillusioned immigrant youth, desperate for wealth and respect. What made all of this worse is the size of the Swedish police force. In 2019, Sweden had 203 police officers for every 100,000 citizens, with the average of 318.

At the time, only Finland and Denmark had fewer police officers, but they weren't dealing with a national crime crisis. We also need to discuss how the gangs managed to fund all of their activities, because buying weapons and recruiting and training members ain't cheap. Part of the answer is drugs.

As we mentioned before, the police estimated that the gangs were importing about 100 to 150 tons of drugs annually, which they sold locally. If the gangs were making as much as their contemporaries in other countries, then they were making millions of dollars in profits. But that's only part of the story.

Swedish authorities believe that the drugs account for only half of the gangs' revenue. The rest comes from defrauding the state.

Sweden's Economic Crime Authority, or SEKA, revealed that members of the Foxtrot gang were running multiple scams, including pretending to provide support to foster homes and getting paid by local authorities for looking after unaccompanied refugee children.

The gang also opened healthcare and vaccination clinics purely to bill local governments, with SEKA estimating that they made $620 million from this type of fraud. On top of this, the gangs supplemented their income with various social security benefits claimed from the state.

Sweden's social insurance agency estimated that around $370 million had been paid out to known gang members in benefits.

Alright, so that's the setup out of the way, the part where we discuss just how bad things have gotten. So now for the far more interesting section, the part where we ask how Sweden managed to turn things around. How did Sweden manage to turn things around?

Choices So, to answer the question, we do need to talk about Ulf Kristersen's government. After the 2022 elections, Kristersen's Moderate Party formed a minority government with the Kristian Democrats and the Liberals, one that was supported by votes from the far-right Sweden Democrats.

The alliance, which was formalized by the Tide Agreement, made fighting the gangs one of the defining pillars of the government.

In December 2022, two weeks after taking office, Kristersen and Sweden Democrats leader Jimmy Åkesson unveiled a wider security package built around giving police room to act before a shooting happens rather than after.

A key part of this package was the introduction of a law letting police stop and search people and vehicles, including children, inside temporary "security zones" in high-crime areas.

As part of that package, the government also proposed allowing anonymous witnesses to testify in courts as a way to overcome the code of silence that existed among gang members.

Stockholm also suggested reducing the age at which social services could intervene and take action on a child without parental approval, from 15 years old to 12 years old.

Finally, the government wanted municipal and regional governments to play a more active role in identifying young people at risk of being drawn into gang crime and preventing this from happening. But while that might sound like a big legislative package, the truth is that these measures were approved by Parliament piecemeal.

And while they all were eventually approved, it didn't happen at once. The greater role for municipal governments was approved in April 2023, took effect in July that year, while the anonymous witness provision was approved in November 2024, and took effect the following January.

So, if you're wondering why it took a while for the numbers to start falling, you can at least partially blame a slow parliamentary process.

Still, these weren't the only measures that the government implemented. They also targeted how the gangs recruited children. The gangs had built an entire recruitment strategy around the fact that children received a slap on the wrist in Sweden for crimes that would have been prosecuted anywhere else, even elsewhere in Scandinavia.

So, in July 2023, Christesson's government made involving a child in a crime its own stand-alone offense punishable by up to four years in prison. The law applies whether the child went willingly or not, closing a loophole that previously let gang leaders avoid prosecution if the child had gone long willingly.

Children under 15 could also be placed under phone and internet surveillance if they were suspected of serious crimes, such as gang assassinations or bomb making.

Then, in August 2026, weeks before the election that would end his premiership, Christesson's parliament went further still. The age of criminal responsibility was lowered from 15 to 14 for the most serious offenses, including murder, kidnapping, and serious weapons charges, taking effect on the 10th of September, and set to last five years unless renewed.

In the same session, lawmakers abolished the quantity discount that would reduce sentences for offenders convicted of several crimes at once.

And just as an aside here, that seems a little bit insane. You're running a two-for-one discount on serious crime. What are you doing?

Now look, reducing the age of criminal responsibility proved to be particularly controversial, with police unions, prosecutors, and prison officials all warning that it could push the gangs to recruit even younger children.

However, it did receive the support of the opposition Social Democrats in a rare moment of consensus between Sweden's left and Sweden's right. Something else changed under Christesson as well: how police approach crime itself.

For most of the gang crisis, Swedish policing had been reactive: a shooting happened, then officers arrived and investigated. In fact, for most of the gang crisis, Swedish policing had been reactive: a shooting happened, then officers arrived and investigated.

As part of the government's first national strategy against organized crime, adopted in February 2024, police shifted toward combining intelligence with real-time information sharing to intercept crimes before they occur.

Parents, school officials, social workers, and even bus drivers have become increasingly important informants, able to spot early warning signs that let police intervene before a crime is committed. Police say the shift helped them arrest and prosecute hundreds of people, and weakened some of the most violent criminal groups.

While all of these were significant changes, they were only effective on the criminals who were within the country.

The leaders of Sweden's most notorious gangs had simply stopped living in Sweden, running murders and bombings by phone from Turkey, Iraq, Serbia, and Montenegro, out of reach of the Swedish authorities.

Reaching them meant convincing other governments that it was worth it to hand over people who, from where those governments sat, were somebody else's problem.

Gunnar Strummer, the nation's justice minister, told the Financial Times that the key to doing this was showing those other countries that the gang leaders would eventually become a problem for them too.

As part of these efforts, Strummer signed a slew of agreements with several nations, including Turkey, the UAE, Iraq, and Morocco, to strengthen police cooperation. And it worked. Two of the nation's main three gang leaders were arrested.

Ismail Abdo, known as Strawberry, the leader of the Rumba crime gang, was arrested in Turkey, and while he wasn't extradited to Sweden, Swedish authorities are working with Turkey to allow Ankara to take over the prosecution of crimes. Mikal Tanezos, the leader of the Stockholm-based Darlen network, was arrested in Mexico and extradited to Sweden.

Additionally, a senior member of the Foxtrot gang, one of the country's most powerful criminal groups who had run a large-scale drug operation from Serbia, was extradited to Sweden, where he was convicted of drug trafficking.

Poyer Shafi, another leading Foxtrot member, was extradited from Iraq in October 2025 and arrested the moment he landed at Stockholm's Arlanda airport. Iraqi officials also handed over a 21-year-old Swedish national who according to investigators played a key role in organizing violent attacks, including by recruiting and exploiting children.

But if you're starting to vibe that all Sweden ever needed was a firm hand to crush the gangs, now is the part of the story where we're going to try and inject a little bit of nuance.

Because years before Christensen came to power, one of Sweden's most crime-riddled cities had experimented with its own violence reduction methods. And it worked. Malmö, the nation's third-largest city, was once nicknamed "Sweden's Chicago," and not due to its residents' love of deep-pan pizza.

Shootings and bombings had gutted the city through the mid-2010s, and in 2018, four years before Christensen took office and while Sweden was still run by the center-left Social Democrats, Malmö imported an American idea called Group Violence Intervention, running it locally under the name "Slooter Shoot" or "Stop Shooting." Under this program, the police,

Prosecutors, social workers, and community members sit known gang members down in a room, sometimes with the victim's family present, and deliver three messages: "The violence stops now.

We can help you get out if you want to. And if the shooting doesn't stop, then all of the state's resources will be used to stop you." Group Violence Intervention has been really successful when applied in the US, leading to a 63% reduction in youth homicide in Boston and a 37% reduction in overall homicides in Chicago.

In Malmö, after the strategy was implemented, shootings dropped from 65 in 2017 to 23 in 2024, that's a 65% drop, while bombings fell from 58 to 16 over the same period, a 72% drop. Importantly, those numbers were already sharply down by 2022 before Christensen came to power.

Now, we have to be careful here because we can't attribute that entire drop to stop shooting alone.

Lots of factors contribute to how violent any given city is, and even if Malmö's softer approach was working, it's still worth bearing in mind that Sweden as a whole didn't see serious reductions until the arrival of the Conservative government.

Still, while some may have characterized Christensen's reforms as harsh, the truth is that they were mostly uncontroversial with the wider public. However, this was not the case when his government decided to grab the third rail of politics in the Western world.

Yes, it's time we talk about the one issue guaranteed to lead to moderate and well-mannered debate: immigration. Migration and Elections At the height of Europe's refugee crisis in 2015, Sweden took in roughly 163,000 asylum seekers, the highest number per capita in the EU.

By 2024, applications had fallen to 9,645, the lowest since 1996, and the number of asylum-related residence permits granted that year was the lowest since 1985.

Applications dropped by another 30% in 2025, a decline of roughly 60% since 2022. Sweden also tightened citizenship and family reunification rules, and started paying migrants to leave voluntarily. This, right here, was the most controversial aspect of the former government's plans.

And that's for reasons that feed into Sweden's very specific relationship with immigration. To be very clear, we're not saying that all immigrants are involved in crime, and the Swedish government has been very explicit that it doesn't believe that either.

However, it has acknowledged that immigrants were suspected of crimes at a rate two and a half times higher than native-born Swedes.

They were also disproportionately represented in the gang's numbers. According to one peer-reviewed study, in 2017, people with a migrant background, meaning foreign-born or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents, made up 33% of the population.

However, that same group accounted for 58% of those suspected of any crime, and 73% of those suspected of murder, manslaughter, or attempted murder.

Government figures cited such statistics to justify the tougher approach to immigration policy. Despite that, it's difficult to quantify how much of an impact immigration had on crime figures, since most gang members who are active today are Swedish citizens who were already living in the country before any of these changes took effect.

However, we also can't say that they've had zero impact.

And that leads us to our next question: did all these measures, taken together, actually work? The stern hand approach, the immigration restrictions, and the general transformation of Swedish law and order? And the answer is, quite unambiguously, yes.

After the 2022 peak, shootings and gun deaths have reduced significantly. At the end of 2024, there were 149 shootings and only 18 deaths. In 2025, shootings dropped a further 63% from the 2022 peak, down to 147 for the year, with murder and manslaughter rates falling to their lowest level in a decade.

During the first half of the year, the number of suicides in Sweden decreased significantly. In the first half of 2026, there were only 39 shootings across the country, the lowest half-year figure since 2017.

As one disbelieving headline ran a few months back: "No shootings in May." As all foreign media outlets that covered it noted, the fact that this headline was so banal was, in itself, extraordinary.

Perhaps most importantly, according to Hanna Pardes, acting head of the police's National Operations Center, the criminal networks are now "significantly weaker than before." Now, we're not saying that all of Sweden's issues have been fixed. Shootings may be much lower, but bombings have increased significantly, jumping from 90 in 2022 to 189 in 2025.

And while some of the gang leaders have been arrested, others are still at large, including Rawa Majid, the head of Foxtrot.

Still, even with these issues, what Sweden has managed to achieve is nothing short of remarkable. In another context, this would have been enough to see the Conservative government sweep back to power with an era-defining landslide. But we already know that didn't happen.

So the question, of course, becomes: why did Ulf Kristersen's government lose at the polls? Well, like with most things in life, the answer boils down to one thing: money. Years of rising inflation, exacerbated by the war in Iran, and a prolonged economic downturn meant that the economy and the cost of living were at the top of most voters' minds.

Unemployment rates are extremely high, 9.1%, according to the government's own figures. And it was even worse among the youth, with 18.4% of people aged 15 to 24 being unemployed.

Niklas Bolin, a professor of political science at Mid-Sweden University, told the press, quoting him: "The research that exists shows quite clearly that the voters think the country's economy is central." According to an exit poll by the news outlet SVT, the economy rose several places among voter concerns, replacing law and order.

So, despite the significant progress that Kristersen's government has made in fighting the gang threat, they were still facing serious headwinds. Sadly for the government, while the voters had been angry about crime in 2022, by 2026 they were angry about something different.

Additionally, the Sweden Democrats, the far-right party propping up Kristersen's government and the one most closely associated with the gang crackdown, lost public support as their neo-Nazi origins and increasingly open anti-Muslim rhetoric became harder for moderate voters to overlook, even after the crime fell.

In an era where hard-right parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe, the Sweden Democrats actually lost support in 2026, dropping 11 seats in parliament and slipping into third place.

Mattias Bäckström-Johansen, the secretary general of the Sweden Democrats, noted that the proposed ban on traditional Islamic headscarves for women and grants to repatriate immigrants might have galvanized opponents.

Ayesha Abdi, whose parents were Somali immigrants, confirmed as much, telling Reuters that the proposed ban on headscarves had upset her, saying, "They claim this is a free country, yet they interfere in other people's cultures and choices.

It is a deeply personal issue for me." As for the incoming government, which will be made up of left-leaning parties, well, it has a difficult task ahead of it. The left has publicly criticized Kristersen's tough-on-crime policies as misguided and seems poised to dismantle some of them when they take over power.

However, if they don't have something equally effective lined up, then Sweden will go back to the dark days of just four years when rampant gang crime left ordinary Swedes feeling their nation was becoming unrecognizable.

For now, though, Sweden's reputation is once again closer to where it was at the turn of the century: a place that's clean, orderly, and safe. We can only pray that the new government manages to keep it that way. Thank you for watching.