alternatehistory.com
Our Own Town
There’s something unmistakeable in the air from the moment of stepping off the train into Malmö’s ageing red-brick Central Station. This place has been in the news so many times that it’s become something of a byword for terrorism, in much the same way as Koloszvár or Havana have for other parts of the world, but as one might expect, the locals are uncomfortable with this reputation. A large banner hanging in the station hall welcomes visitors to the “City of Parks”, and the image of greenery and water is prominent in the brochures I find at the tourist office across the road from the station. They have been trying for some time to find a suitable tourism slogan, I’m told – including one memorable incident in 2009 when they tried to celebrate Scania’s agricultural heritage by referring to the large production of rapeseed in the province, getting the English translation ever so slightly wrong and birthing a short-lived sensation on the teletype in the process. Of course, the translation mistakes go both ways, as anyone who has heard the ten or so variant pronunciations of “Malmö” that can be heard in foreign media can attest. Matters are of course not helped by the dispute over whether Ö or Ø is the appropriate letter to use in the city’s name, a question so heavily steeped in sectarianism that more and more public sources opt for the internationalised “Malmo” as a neutral position.
It’s not far from the station to the hotel – across the canal and then across the street, in fact. Both Malmö and Lund once had broad ramparts protecting the city from attack, and while Lund’s ones are long gone, Malmö has retained the former city moat in the form of a roughly rectangular canal enveloping the historic city centre. Boats have run around it in summer for the benefit of tourists, but as of now the service has stopped, and in the colder seasons the canal is largely disused. It was the scene of 1998’s “Walpurgis Bath” incident, where a number of largely Protestant students from the Borgarskolan grammar school celebrating Walpurgis Night were run into the canal by members of a pro-Danish student society at Malmö Latinskola, but with that exception it is about the only part of Malmö where there have been no noteworthy attacks of any kind. This can perhaps be explained by the existence of Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods both inside and outside the canal, which has made it something of a unifying symbol as one of the few structures prominently associated with neither side.
The first person I’m meeting with is Per Gahrton, deputy leader of the Scanian Democrats party and one of Malmö’s twenty deputies to the Lantdag. The Democrats are technically a unionist party as they advocate no change from the status quo, but have always stood for (their own brand of) common sense before sectarian divisions. They’re dogged in this by their almost exclusive association with the Protestant part of the province, having only a small number of prominent Catholic members, and their failure to extend far beyond the Malmö-Lund area and surrounding exurbs. Of their ten deputies, only one represents a rural division, and it is Österlen, filled with middle-aged transplants from the metropolis and differing significantly from the rest of the province in many ways. Gahrton represents Malmö West and Limhamn, a largely Protestant division where he polled second in the personal vote for the 2016 elections, narrowly beaten by Mårten Billström, the top candidate for the Union Party.
I meet Gahrton in his constituency office, which is in a block of flats on a side street not far from Fridhem, the most important commercial centre in the western part of the city. This isn’t remotely unusual – even the Union Party have frequently resorted to renting office space in most of suburban Malmö, the Lodges of Vasa increasingly being seen as somewhat impolitic meeting places for the party itself. Gahrton is well-known for holding biweekly open houses where his constituents can come to him with their issues, which puts him a cut above most politicians here in terms of outreach, and very likely has a part to play in his popularity. As I enter the office, I realise it’s the day of one such meeting as there’s a sign on the door and chairs lined up along one of the walls.
My first question is simple. Why is the province still so deeply divided?
He laughs. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Personally, I’d like nothing more than for us to be like the rest of Sweden, or indeed Denmark” – he seems to add on the latter part as an afterthought – “but it seems not many people agree with me. People still take stock in their religious and cultural identity, and ultimately that determines who they vote for more than any policy question. It seems to be changing in some sections of society – we managed to beat the Union Party in Malmö Central last time, for the first time ever, and we got within ten percent of them in this division. But in most of the rest of the province, the politics of identity still reigns, and it’s showing very few signs of stopping.”
“Is it fair to categorise things that way? Wouldn’t it be possible to say that the moderation of the Union and Labour Parties in recent years means that some people have begun to vote for them out of ideology rather than identity?”
“Possibly, but it’s hard to see evidence of that happening. And in any case, once elected, they seem not to act on that much. The Union Party seems to be more willing to work with the Scanian League than they are to work with us or Labour, we saw that clearly after the last election, and I think it’s a shame that they’d rather govern with sectarian nutters than work constructively for the good of the province with us.”
“So you disagree with the view that the Premier is moderate to liberal by the standards of his party?”
“By the standards of his party, I don’t know, but he’s no moderate by any standard I can subscribe to.”
As I leave his office, I’m surprised by how anyone with a temperament like Gahrton’s can be considered a popular affable moderate, but of course, I’ve only been in Scania for two days.
There’s something unmistakeable in the air from the moment of stepping off the train into Malmö’s ageing red-brick Central Station. This place has been in the news so many times that it’s become something of a byword for terrorism, in much the same way as Koloszvár or Havana have for other parts of the world, but as one might expect, the locals are uncomfortable with this reputation. A large banner hanging in the station hall welcomes visitors to the “City of Parks”, and the image of greenery and water is prominent in the brochures I find at the tourist office across the road from the station. They have been trying for some time to find a suitable tourism slogan, I’m told – including one memorable incident in 2009 when they tried to celebrate Scania’s agricultural heritage by referring to the large production of rapeseed in the province, getting the English translation ever so slightly wrong and birthing a short-lived sensation on the teletype in the process. Of course, the translation mistakes go both ways, as anyone who has heard the ten or so variant pronunciations of “Malmö” that can be heard in foreign media can attest. Matters are of course not helped by the dispute over whether Ö or Ø is the appropriate letter to use in the city’s name, a question so heavily steeped in sectarianism that more and more public sources opt for the internationalised “Malmo” as a neutral position.
It’s not far from the station to the hotel – across the canal and then across the street, in fact. Both Malmö and Lund once had broad ramparts protecting the city from attack, and while Lund’s ones are long gone, Malmö has retained the former city moat in the form of a roughly rectangular canal enveloping the historic city centre. Boats have run around it in summer for the benefit of tourists, but as of now the service has stopped, and in the colder seasons the canal is largely disused. It was the scene of 1998’s “Walpurgis Bath” incident, where a number of largely Protestant students from the Borgarskolan grammar school celebrating Walpurgis Night were run into the canal by members of a pro-Danish student society at Malmö Latinskola, but with that exception it is about the only part of Malmö where there have been no noteworthy attacks of any kind. This can perhaps be explained by the existence of Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods both inside and outside the canal, which has made it something of a unifying symbol as one of the few structures prominently associated with neither side.
The first person I’m meeting with is Per Gahrton, deputy leader of the Scanian Democrats party and one of Malmö’s twenty deputies to the Lantdag. The Democrats are technically a unionist party as they advocate no change from the status quo, but have always stood for (their own brand of) common sense before sectarian divisions. They’re dogged in this by their almost exclusive association with the Protestant part of the province, having only a small number of prominent Catholic members, and their failure to extend far beyond the Malmö-Lund area and surrounding exurbs. Of their ten deputies, only one represents a rural division, and it is Österlen, filled with middle-aged transplants from the metropolis and differing significantly from the rest of the province in many ways. Gahrton represents Malmö West and Limhamn, a largely Protestant division where he polled second in the personal vote for the 2016 elections, narrowly beaten by Mårten Billström, the top candidate for the Union Party.
I meet Gahrton in his constituency office, which is in a block of flats on a side street not far from Fridhem, the most important commercial centre in the western part of the city. This isn’t remotely unusual – even the Union Party have frequently resorted to renting office space in most of suburban Malmö, the Lodges of Vasa increasingly being seen as somewhat impolitic meeting places for the party itself. Gahrton is well-known for holding biweekly open houses where his constituents can come to him with their issues, which puts him a cut above most politicians here in terms of outreach, and very likely has a part to play in his popularity. As I enter the office, I realise it’s the day of one such meeting as there’s a sign on the door and chairs lined up along one of the walls.
My first question is simple. Why is the province still so deeply divided?
He laughs. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Personally, I’d like nothing more than for us to be like the rest of Sweden, or indeed Denmark” – he seems to add on the latter part as an afterthought – “but it seems not many people agree with me. People still take stock in their religious and cultural identity, and ultimately that determines who they vote for more than any policy question. It seems to be changing in some sections of society – we managed to beat the Union Party in Malmö Central last time, for the first time ever, and we got within ten percent of them in this division. But in most of the rest of the province, the politics of identity still reigns, and it’s showing very few signs of stopping.”
“Is it fair to categorise things that way? Wouldn’t it be possible to say that the moderation of the Union and Labour Parties in recent years means that some people have begun to vote for them out of ideology rather than identity?”
“Possibly, but it’s hard to see evidence of that happening. And in any case, once elected, they seem not to act on that much. The Union Party seems to be more willing to work with the Scanian League than they are to work with us or Labour, we saw that clearly after the last election, and I think it’s a shame that they’d rather govern with sectarian nutters than work constructively for the good of the province with us.”
“So you disagree with the view that the Premier is moderate to liberal by the standards of his party?”
“By the standards of his party, I don’t know, but he’s no moderate by any standard I can subscribe to.”
As I leave his office, I’m surprised by how anyone with a temperament like Gahrton’s can be considered a popular affable moderate, but of course, I’ve only been in Scania for two days.
- Utgard96
- Word Count: 1.1k