“That’s our Prime Minister!”, you said, and pointed at the TV. That’s right, I thought, but it doesn’t mean more than that he is a person with power and a great responsibility to do what is right. Your Prime Minister doesn’t take that responsibility. Your Prime Minister, and the invisible Prime Minister who steers him, are pursuing a political vision of Sweden that doesn’t include people like you. It doesn’t include your sister, your mother, your grandfather or your cousins – it doesn’t include the people you love.
On February 4th, 2025, a white armed man enters a school in Örebro and opens fire. In Sweden’s worst mass shooting in modern times, Rickard Andersson deprives the life of ten people and injures a further six, before he turns the weapon on himself. Though all of the victims named in the media are of foreign descent, police and politicians quickly assure the public that there are no indications of ideological motives. The story settles into a familiar contour: the perpetrator is portrayed as a lonely and troubled individual, whose hardships and frustrations culminated in an act of violence framed as a private collapse rather than a political act.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. We have seen this before: Peter Mangs, Anton Lundin Pettersson, John Ausonius. Each notorious for their attacks on people of color, yet the dominant narrative softened their crimes and blurred their intensions. This mitigating discourse is not incidental; while white violence is granted complexity and humanization; violence committed by immigrants is made collective. It is weaponized to further legitimize racist political agendas. Perhaps this is the wager of contemporary politics – if life in Sweden is rendered precarious enough, those deemed unwanted, those stripped of dignity and belonging, will eventually drift toward the horizon.
In the days that follow the attack, the Prime Minister visits the site and expresses his grief while standing amid the embers of a fire his own rhetoric may have helped kindle. For years, Swedish politicians have sown division, identified an enemy and normalized discrimination, hate speech, harassment and threats. Then, when the bullet finally travels its expected path, they point to the gun and claim innocence, though their rhetoric was what granted the bullet permission in the first place. It did not pull the trigger, but it steadied the hand.
Written in the months following the mass shooting in Örebro, Not Your Prime Minister lays bare the long-standing discourse rooted in racism, which is further sustained by the current political climate in Sweden. With searing urgency and uncompromising critique, Nicolas Lunabba delivers an explosive indictment about society’s double standards, where immigrants are punished even in death, recast as both victim and culprit, blamed for the hatred that led to their demise. Not Your Prime Minister stands as an acute testimony of the normalization of far-right political parties, the violence directed at immigrants, and the devastating consequences it has – on someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s life.
