Why this matters

In the past few years, scholars have noted the far right’s use of legal instruments such as litigation, highly publicized courtroom battles, the assertion or denial of rights, and the systematic weakening of democratic procedures (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023; Scheppele Reference Scheppele2018). In Hungary, Viktor Orbán successfully rewrote the country’s constitution to remain in power (Scheppele Reference Scheppele2018); in the United States and in Poland, right-wing movements have successfully limited access to abortions through legal activism (Kocemba Reference Kocemba2023). In Sweden, far-right actors have used defamation cases to denounce, silence, and intimidate political opponents (Admund Funck Reference Admund Funck2024); they have litigated to protect their right to burn the Quran (Civil Rights Defenders 2023); and they have sought to rewrite the Swedish Constitution to define ethnoracial Swedes as the sovereign people of Sweden (Brännström Reference Brännström, Arvidsson and Brännström2020; Sverigedemokraterna 2019). Far-right groups now have access to legitimate, legal arenas through which they can pursue their goals through the law and through the courts (Blokker Reference Blokker2019; Gloppen Reference Gloppen2018; Pinos and Hau Reference Pinos and Hau2022). Violent extremists pose obvious risks to liberal democracies, but we are just beginning to understand and explain the dynamics of right-wing legal mobilization.

This study has practical implications, as right-wing legal mobilization – how these movements come to frame their grievances in the language of rights, pursuing their claims through legal institutions (Stryker Reference Stryker2007) – can normalize the repression through juridification. Legal arenas lend legitimacy to certain kinds of claims that may be untenable otherwise (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2007). These arenas are major sites of meaning-making about social conflict itself (Pedriana Reference Pedriana2006). Apparently, extremist demands – such as mass expulsions – are today being facilitated by democratic legal institutions through return migration regimes in Sweden and ICE raids in the United States. Research by scholars of the far right has defined extremism as operating outside conventional liberal institutions (Mudde Reference Mudde2019). Our analysis suggests this is no longer the case (if it ever was).

Far-right studies and the critique of the mainstreaming paradigm

A rich body of scholarship has developed to explain and interpret the rise of far-right movements across Europe, the United States, and Latin America (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2020; Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020; Mudde Reference Mudde2019; Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023). Right-wing movements have made strong showings across the middle classes and, in Europe, siphoned off working-class voters and made inroads across center and moderate parties (Salo and Rydgren Reference Salo and Rydgren2021). Specifically, they have made these gains by mobilizing around anti-immigrant sentiment, promoting nationalist agendas and ethnonationalist identities in response to increased migration and demographic declines, and drumming up fear of the great replacement by foreigners, migrants, and ethnic and religious minorities (Bracke and Aguilar Reference Bracke and Hernandez Aguilar2024; Barker Reference Barker2025). In Europe, some right-wing movements promote old-world jus sanguinis, emphasizing national belonging by blood, ethnicity, and often mythical connections to the land (Miller-Idriss Reference Miller-Idriss2020). They have engaged and amplified nostalgia for an idealized past (Elgenius and Rydgren Reference Elgenius and Rydgren2019) while predicting future hellscapes, wrought by crime, disorder, gangs, and poverty, laying blame on others and outsiders who ruined the dream. These racializing tropes and narratives are influential winning tickets, as recent elections suggest. Governments in Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have all had governments led or in some way supported by far-right parties.

Research into the growing success of the populist radical right party family in Europe has led to the development and entrenchment of the mainstreaming paradigm, that is, the claim that extreme ideas travel from the periphery to the center. Brown et al. (Reference Brown, Mondon and Winter2023) found that literature on the far-right typically considers mainstreaming as a unidirectional process in which marginal actors, discourses, or ideologies become an institutional center of liberal democratic life. In this definition of mainstreaming, “ideas which are at one time unacceptable can become not only acceptable, but actually normal and even common sense through the process of mainstreaming” (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Mondon and Winter2023: 172). Following this metaphor, foundational academic understandings of the parliamentary populist radical right defined these parties as fundamentally illiberal “due to the belief that promoting exclusion, hierarchy, dehumanization, inequality, intolerance, or ethnonationalism opposes liberalism” (Tetrault 2024: 5). The mainstream, framed as infiltrated or defiled by far-right movements, is conflated with liberalism itself (Tetrault 2024). Equality before the law and human rights protections are core ideals in the vast political vocabulary of liberalism (Freeden and Steers Reference Freeden, Stears, Freeden and Stears2013). Our case contributes to the growing critique of the mainstreaming paradigm, as our findings, discussed below, show how the Swedish far-right mobilizes precisely this language of universal rights while advocating for exclusionary policies.

We argue that this oversight in the field of far-right studies could, in part, stem from the field’s extensive focus on electoral politics and political science foundations (Castelli Gattinara Reference Castelli Gattinara2020), which have had little to say about legal movements or legal rights claims (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023). This is contradictory because in this context of widespread scholarly claims of mainstreaming – electoral success will implicitly open legitimate pathways to influence judicial realms from within liberal democratic systems. Legal struggles over rights, duties, and fundamental freedoms resonate with right-wing cultural conflicts over citizenship, moral worth, and belonging. Leaders in the field have only recently acknowledged this oversight (Bures et al. Reference Bures, Mudde, McIntosh, HoSang, Lowndes, Block, Givens, Moallem, Ahmed, Figueiredo, Mason, Joffe, Bures and Griffin2023), but have yet to build explanatory or interpretative approaches concerning the role of law in right-wing movements. Those scholars who have engaged with these issues in Europe largely look to the Eastern European cases where far-right politics have been firmly established for decades, specifically in Polish and Hungarian parliaments. Legal scholars Kim Lane Scheppele (Reference Scheppele2018) and Paul Blokker (Reference Blokker2019) have found right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland, respectively, to have made constitutional changes to usurp political power and depress opposition. Scheppele (Reference Scheppele2018) calls this process autocratic legalism, using the example of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who has used legal reforms to weaken the checks and balances on executive power, take over judicial appointments, and rewrite election laws so he could stay in power, and do so in the name of the people. Scheppele warns that autocratic legalism, with its specific set of legal tactics, can be transported to other regions and contexts.

Legal mobilization

To get a better handle on how right-wing movements turn to law to achieve their political or social goals, we refer to the literature on legal mobilization. Law and society scholarship has made major contributions in explaining how and why individuals, social groups, and movements come to realize, name, and claim grievances through law and how they come to assert, exercise, and demand rights – what these scholars call legal mobilization (Stryker Reference Stryker2007). Social movements, in their pursuit of social change, intuitively tend to frame their issues in terms of legal rights and pursue legal remedies (McCann Reference McCann1994). In terms of social movements turning to law, Nicholas Pedriana (Reference Pedriana2006) was one of the first to identify and theorize how social movements frame their issues within legal categories to bring out deeper cultural meaning and resonance (also see Shiff Reference Shiff2020). Going beyond legal tactics or specific legal forums, Pedriana’s legal framing concept connects social movements to law to broader cultural relevance and meaning-making. His study on the 1960s women’s movement, for example, shows how the pursuit of equal treatment through legal challenges tapped into symbolic processes over the role and meaning of gender equality in society. We find this approach fruitful and return to the centrality of legal framing as cultural boundary-making for our case of right-wing legal mobilization.

Recent literature on legal mobilization has internally debated what counts as legal mobilization. As reviews of this contested field indicate (Emilio and Taylor Reference Emilio and Taylor2020; Matthews Reference Matthews2023), scholars disagree about what kinds of activities or forums should be considered as legal mobilization. Some argue that legal mobilization should be limited to litigation in which individuals or movements pursue rights claims through lawsuits (Epp Reference Epp1998; see Emilio and Taylor Reference Emilio and Taylor2020). Other scholars, such as Siri Gloppen (Reference Gloppen2018), who have advanced the field by broadening the concept to include a wide range of legal contestations over political and social change, have nevertheless privileged courts as central sites of legal struggles. By contrast, Handmaker and Taekema (Reference Handmaker and Taekema2023) consider legal mobilization as a holistic struggle for progressive social change or social justice. They emphasize the centrality of civic actors over state actors, elites, or courtroom players and take a wide view of legal activities. Emilio and Taylor (Reference Emilio and Taylor2020) seek to integrate disparate approaches by incorporating the role of symbolic meaning, binding rules, and institutional mechanisms, yet they limit legal mobilization to engagement with formal institutions. For our case, we follow a broad cultural approach to legal mobilization (Pedriana Reference Pedriana2006) that conceptualizes legal framing and legal categories as cultural boundary work and meaning-making about social relations that can occur both inside and outside formal institutions.

The legal mobilization literature, while extensive and insightful, has been focused almost exclusively on progressive movements that have sought to expand rather than retract rights. In their recent review in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Jennifer Earl and Jessica Maves Braithwaite (Reference Earl and Braithwaite2022) make this point. They argue that law and society scholarship has tended to examine social movements that resist repression and advocate for the protection of civil liberties and the provision of rights, and do so in national, international, and transnational contexts. As noted above, Handmaker and Taekema (Reference Handmaker and Taekema2023) intentionally define legal mobilization as civic actors seeking social justice with an emphasis on human rights. In Lehoucq and Taylor’s review, they hold up the classic case of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)’s legal strategy to overturn segregation in Brown v. Board of Education as an emblematic example of legal mobilization. The related literature on cause lawyering, which examines the specific role of lawyers advocating for social justice, has focused on the expansion or protection of rights for marginalized groups (see Sarat and Scheingold Reference Sarat and Scheingold2006). Likewise, social movement scholars have examined the legal battles of the labor movement (McCann Reference McCann1994), gay rights (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Collins, Rhodes and Rice2024), and prisoners’ rights (Calavita and Jenness Reference Calavita and Jenness2015), and their efforts to expand rights and protections for marginalized groups. In the Nordic context, the emergent literature on legal mobilization has similarly focused on civil society organizations that have sought to expand or uphold rights, providing an overview of human rights advocacy through the Civil Rights Defenders, the protection of individual rights from the state, and the struggle for indigenous land rights of the Sami people (Schaffer et al. Reference Schaffer, Langford and Madsen2024). While it is clear that this collective body of work has advanced our knowledge about the strategies and successes of this kind of legal mobilization, it is nevertheless incomplete.

Without a better understanding of how and why movements pursue legal means to repress or retract rights, our explanatory frameworks are limited. The dynamics that motivate, facilitate, or block legal mobilization may or may not be the same for right-wing movements, and we may have taken the particular for the general. By seeking to take away and restrict the rights of certain individuals and whole categories of people, right-wing legal mobilizations have the potential to weaken a basic building block of liberal democracy, that is, the recognition of all people as rights-bearing individuals.

Right against rights approach

To understand and explain far-right legal mobilization, we bring together insights from the sociological right against rights framework (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023) with scholarship on the far right (Blee et al. Reference Blee, Futrell and Simi2024; Mudde Reference Mudde2019). Together, these conceptual tools can help us better explain how right-wing mobilizations pursue legal means to repress and retract rights, which suggests a historical shift away from strengthening and expanding rights in democratic societies to weakening and limiting rights (also see Earl and Braithwaite Reference Earl and Braithwaite2022).

In their collection, The Right against Rights in Latin America, Leigh Payne, Julia Zulver, and Simón Escoffier developed the concept of the right against rights to capture how right-wing movements across Latin America have sought to repress the rights of women, LGBTQ+ persons, climate activists, indigenous people, and other marginalized groups who have made recent, relative gains on rights. The concept succinctly encapsulates the “politics of contention over rights” (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023: 5), that is, it connects legal rights to political struggles without delimiting these contests to litigation, courts, or other legal forums. The approach does not assume that struggles over rights are inherently progressive. Any struggle over rights will implicitly have a progressive and regressive side, with one actor aiming to expand rights while their opposition aims to limit those rights. But what the right-against-rights frameworks point towards is that the literature on legal mobilization has overwhelmingly assumed that grassroots legal mobilization aims to expand rights while treating the state as the actor intending to limit them. Notable exceptions include, for example, the large body of work studying NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) movements and anti-abortion activists.

The right against rights approach allows for an examination of collective action outside conventional politics, such as street demonstrations around rights struggles, and pays attention to how far-right movements cooperate with established political parties. This approach is an important analytical intervention, as scholars of far-right movements have demonstrated the increasingly blurred lines between conventional party politics and grassroots street movements (Pietro and Pirro Reference Castelli Gattinara and Pirro2019). Blee et al. (Reference Blee, Futrell and Simi2024) liken this shift in organizational structure to a constellation, as far-right movements have been shown to be interconnected across networks, actors, and social media, and although they make up a recognizable pattern of ideology, practices, and demands, they do not neatly fall into a self-contained or traditional social movement organization.

The right against rights approach further offers categories of analysis by focusing on contests over rights. As Payne writes, right against rights mobilizations seek to “roll back the rights gains of previously marginalized groups, undermine those rights-seekers, and reassert their traditionally held social, economic, cultural, and political rights” (Payne Reference Payne, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023: 29). In contrast to the history of civil rights movements, for example, right-wing mobilization around rights usually entails the repression and retraction of rights. In extreme cases, movements have resorted to extra-legal violence to threaten rights seekers. The use of violence against right-seekers is a distinctive feature of what Payne calls “uncivil” movements, which not only advance more extremist views but also readily deploy exclusionary, oppositional, and violent practices to reach their goals (Payne Reference Payne, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023: 30). In the same anthology, Ritholtz and Mesquita illustrate this point in their case study of anti-rights mobilizations against LGBT+ in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, which they argue went beyond antagonistic efforts to roll back rights to actively and violently “eliminate LGBT+ right seekers” (Ritholtz and Mesquita Reference Ritholtz, Mesquita, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023:101–103). As scholars of strongmen and fascist regimes explain, violence, especially institutionalized state violence, has been central to the repression of rights in Europe and Latin America (Ben-Ghiat Reference Ben-Ghiat2020: 166). The Swedish case, as we illustrate below, departs from this form of violence yet shares a conceptualization of rights – facilitated by the view that not everyone is considered equal or worthy of the same rights.

The right against rights approach provides useful distinctions in how these movements tend to conceptualize rights themselves, materializing what Arendt (Reference Arendt2017 (1951): 290) called “the right to have rights.” Escoffier et al. (Reference Escoffier, Payne, Zulver, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023: 4) explain how right-wing mobilizations tend to define rights based on earned worthiness rather than on intrinsic human dignity. On the right, this means that rights must be earned for those who are deemed deserving and worthy, and denied to those deemed undeserving and unworthy. This view contrasts with a more universal and human rights conception that is based on the “inherent freedom and equality that all humans enjoy in their moral and legal existence” and tends to be central to left-wing protection and expansion of rights (Escoffier et al. Reference Escoffier, Payne, Zulver, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023: 4). If rights are perceived as something that one earns, rather than inherent, then rights can be awarded or taken away. If rights are perceived as awarded rather than inherent, they can also be taken away through politically variable, legally standardized methods. Contests over rights are likely to take many more forms and vary by historical and cultural context, as well as by movement. In our case, we identify empirical support for such a right-wing version of rights, as right-wing actors tend to deem noncitizens, migrants, and ethnic and racial minorities as unworthy of the rights and duties of citizenship, and so whatever privileges that have been conferred can be taken away, including citizenship itself (Tidö Agreement 2022: 38). Simultaneously, we see how right-wing movements advocate for fundamental freedoms for (some, not all) citizens, which is mobilized to undermine the rights of minorities. There is a complex interplay of rights claims.

From here, we build on the right against rights framework, providing a modification that may have implications for similarly situated contexts. In our case, the right against rights is advanced in the name of democratic values and principles rather than exclusively on traditional values such as patriarchy, family values, the rights of religion, or anti-rights campaigns fueled by homophobia or exclusively through the repression of rights or threats of violence as described in the volume of Latin American cases (Payne et al. Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023). For example, although our case entails conflicts over religious freedom, right-wing movements mobilize freedom of expression to repress religious minorities, particularly practicing Muslims. This dynamic contrasts with Corredor’s (Reference Corredor, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023) case of Colombia and De Souza Santos’s (Reference De Souza Santos, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023) case of Brazil, in which the Catholic and Evangelical Churches, respectively, espouse religious right and family values to challenge and repress abortion rights, women’s rights, and the rights of LGBTQ+ persons. In our case, democratic rights are pitted against religious minorities.

This key insight emerged inductively, as our study of right-wing legal mobilizations did not neatly conform to Payne et al.’s (Reference Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023) right against rights framework or neatly fit into their categorization of mobilizations, each with a specific set of rights claims and actors, even as our case shared certain elements, such as the aim to repress the rights of minorities. As we illustrate below, the right against rights in Sweden promotes democratic rights and values, including free speech and rights for LGBTQ+ persons. But it does so through a zero-sum game calculation of certain minority rights, including freedom of religion and migrants’ rights. What right-wing movements claim as universal is often more particular and contextual. Freedom of religion, for example, although protected in the Constitution, known as the Instrument of Government (Sveriges Riksdag Reference Sveriges2025)), the Freedom of Religion Act of 1952, and the European Convention on Human Rights Article 9, does not necessarily extend to religious diversity or the practice of “foreign religions” in Sweden (Lundgren Reference Lundgren2021; Demker Reference Demker2023:117).

We conceptualize this dynamic as the duality of democracy. Right-wing movements speak to this double-sided nature of democracy, which espouses equality for all while fiercely guarding who counts as part of the polity (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004). In Sweden, the People’s Home, that is, the imagined and institutionalized community of the welfare state, sits on a cracked foundation: one side upholds equal rights for everyone regardless of class, status, region, or religion, while the other insists on equal rights for specific kinds of people, the Swedish people, based on shared ethnocultural heritage, Swedish values, and tradition (Barker Reference Barker2013, Reference Barker2017a). This dualism highlights how political actors, parties, and movements have capitalized on this fissure: they speak to one side while claiming to speak for the other and sometimes sincerely speaking to both. We see this as related to and yet distinct from “framejacking” identified by Kane et al. (Reference Kane, Moragas, Stallone, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023) in which right-wing mobilizations, particularly conservative Christians, co-opted the language of rights to advocate for the traditional rights of the family to oppose sexual and reproductive rights. In our case, right-wing mobilizations similarly use the language of rights, but they call upon fundamental freedoms grounded in the Constitution to retract the rights of others. As such, we contend this nuanced view of how democratic values are used by right-wing movements may help us better understand the liberal democratic roots of the success of right-against-rights mobilization.

Context: immigration and religion in Sweden

Across Europe, societies such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden are all grappling with increased immigrationFootnote ² (Parr Reference Parr2023) and the increased visibility of religious minorities, particularly Muslims, which has challenged basic assumptions about the place of religious freedom in democratic societies (Demker Reference Demker2023; Lundgren Reference Lundgren2021). In Sweden, the desecration of a religious text exposed social, political, and legal conflicts around rights in a country that does not usually engage in rights talk as a site of political struggle (Schaffer et al. Reference Schaffer, Langford and Madsen2024; Schultz Reference Schultz2023). The public debate around and political reactions to the repeated desecration of the Quran from 2020 until 2023 raised conflicts over freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. These conflicts over who is worthy of rights in Sweden further exposed cultural conflicts over multiculturalism and how Muslims would or could integrate into secular society.

In Sweden, the proportion of religious minorities has grown substantially in recent years. Following patterns of immigration and refugees fleeing civil wars from the Middle East and North Africa (e.g., Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia) and the former Yugoslavia, for example, registered membership in Muslim religious communities has increased over 1000 percent in Sweden since 1976 (Lundgren Reference Lundgren2021: 53 and Appendix 3).Footnote ³ This increase has occurred just as the majority population claims to have become more secular (Haerpfer et al. Reference Haerpfer, Inglehart, Moreno, Welzel, Kizilova, Diez-Medrano, Lagos, Norris and Puranen2022) and often view Muslims as a threat to national identity, modernization, freedom of expression, and Christian culture (Ahmadi et al. Reference Ahmadi, Darvishpour, Ahmadi and Palm2020; Lundgren Reference Lundgren2021; Demker Reference Demker2023, Reference Demker2016: 24). During the 2015 refugee crisis, for example, Sweden admitted one of the highest rates of asylum seekers in Europe, with just over 160,000 asylum seekers from Syria and other predominantly Muslim countries (SCB 2025), which was twice the previous year’s number of asylum applications (SCB 2025), and a substantial increase in a relatively short period of time.

While the number of asylum seekers has declined in recent years and emigration has surpassed immigration for the first time in 50 years (Ministry of Justice 2025), social conflicts over integration have continued. Moreover, freedom of religion has become more contested in Sweden than we might have expected, especially given that religious freedom is protected by the Swedish Constitution (Instrument of Government, Chapter 2), by Sweden’s Freedom of Religion Act of 1952, and by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, an international treaty that Sweden has signed.

A recent national survey of public opinion in Sweden found that a majority of those surveyed did not agree that immigrants should be allowed to freely practice their religion in Sweden (SOM Institute in Demker Reference Demker2023: 117). We note here that over 20 percent of the Swedish population has a foreign background, which includes children born in Sweden with two foreign parents and all those who are foreign-born (SCB (Statistics Sweden) 2025). In the Diversity Barometer, which routinely measures Swedish public opinion on immigration, half of the respondents did not think that all religions have the same value, with Islam viewed as problematic (Ahmadi et al, Reference Ahmadi, Darvishpour, Ahmadi and Palm2020: 35).

Studying the far-right movement in Sweden along its horizontal and vertical axes

We study this movement along horizontal and vertical dimensions to better capture the fluidity between the grassroots and party politics. Vertically, we advocate considering the interactions between the parliamentary right and the movement’s grassroots. Horizontally, we consider the alliances between radical actors and the mainstream right within parliament (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020).

Horizontally, the right-wing coalition government is mobilizing against the rights of others, specifically rights around religious freedom and immigration. The right-wing coalition is made up of a center-right Moderate party, the Liberals, and Christian Democrats – but it is contingent on a confidence and supply deal with the Sweden Democrats (SD). SD spent the first 20 years of their existence as a party isolated in Swedish parliamentary politics. But in 2018, breaking one of Europe’s longest-standing cordons sanitaires, the Moderate party announced they were willing to collaborate with SD. Academic literature has connected the party’s mainstreaming to changing voter demands, SD’s apt politicization of the immigration issue, and their overcoming the stigma of their roots in extreme right street organizing (Rydgren and van der Meiden Reference Rydgren and van der Meiden2019).

SD formed as a reformist new nationalist alternative to the country’s extreme right “hooligan cliché, claiming an alternative identity as peaceful, profession, erudite, and victimized” (Teitelbaum 2017: 30). Yet, “No matter how hard a far right party tries to reform itself, if the broader political system is not open to welcoming it and its ideas, it is bound to remain at the margins” (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2020: 90). SDs’ anti-immigrant rhetoric has been adopted by conservative and Social Democratic parties alike (Ekholm Reference Ekholm2022). The Moderate party’s willingness to collaborate was not a decision made under coercion but a decision made in the interest of furthering the party’s power and influence after decades of refusing SD’s support.

Vertically, we study reactions to the desecrations of the Quran in Sweden between 2020 and 2023 in public media, official party documents, and speeches between the parliamentary and grassroots flanks of the movement. A range of actors engaged in Quran desecrations in this period, but most notably Rasmus Paludan. Paludan is a well-known figure in Sweden and Denmark for his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant stunts (Switzer and Beauduin Reference Switzer and Beauduin2023). Paludan applied for the legal permits to stage these events, had them filmed, distributed them through YouTube and other social media platforms, and provoked government officials and right-wing elites into responding to the events. This example provides a lens into the dynamic interplay between grassroots activism and party elites, which has been shown to be integral to far-right mobilization (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro Reference Castelli Gattinara and Pirro2019).

In Sweden, this long-term interplay along horizontal and vertical axes has culminated in Tidöavtalet or the Tidö Agreement of 2022: the governing agreement between the right-wing coalition government: the Moderates, Christian Democrats, and Liberals, in cooperation with SD. The Tidö Agreement is a similar type of document to a white paper in the British context or a blueprint in the US context: it sets out and communicates the government’s key goals, values, underlying philosophy, and specific policy proposals and legal frameworks. Though not legally binding, the Tidö Agreement is central to governing decisions, budget decisions, and parliamentary proposals. Each element must pass through Parliament to become binding, leading to more staggered enactment of provisions.

While the Tidö Agreement contains proposals on nearly all government policy domains (e.g., education, finance, energy, and crime), we focus on the section called “The Directive on Migration and Integration,” which includes the central proposals on migration control in Sweden. The government has repeatedly described its legal overhaul of this system as “paradigm shifting” in its restrictiveness and logic (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 29).Footnote ⁴ Several of the proposals have already come into force by 2023, including but not limited to new restrictions of humanitarian residence permits; limits on family reunification; increased financial requirements for those with work permits to enter and stay in Sweden; increased information flows between police, security, and migration agencies; increased removal and return processes; the opening of six return centers; and increasing the priority and review of revocation cases to take away residency permits and naturalized citizenship (FARR 2025). The Tidö Agreement does not make it illegal to migrate to Sweden, but it seeks to weaken the legal protections for noncitizens to remain in the country and increase the barriers on entry. Given the country’s historical commitments to international human rights (e.g., United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights), it is unlikely the current government could impose an outright ban on migration. Instead, the Tidö Agreement proposes ways to make it legally more difficult to enter and easier to exit. The Tidö Agreement affects all citizens and noncitizens in Sweden, but the restrictive migration proposals will have a heavy impact on people of color, ethnic and religious minorities, and noncitizens whose rights are being challenged, as we illustrate below.

Data selection and collection

In terms of data, following case study methods (Flyvbjerg Reference Flyvbjerg, Denzin and Lincoln2011; Yin Reference Yin2009; Rubin Reference Rubin2021), we rely on different kinds of materials, including: the Swedish Constitution (Instrument of Government, Chapter 2) as it established basic freedoms in the country and were cited and referred to in public debate; the police permits for the Quran burnings (A. Polisen Reference Polisen2020a; B. Polisen Reference Polisen2020b) to illustrate the reasoning about them; the government and party statements about these events to illustrate how they frame the issues, including Summer Talks by party leaders as these are highly visible national addresses to the nation about the state of affairs in the country, which in the summer of 2023 coincided with the Quran events; the government’s most recent migration proposals outlined in the Tidö Agreement which provides the content of migration policy (e.g., proposals such as increased deportation) and textual information about how the government coalition frames the issues of migration and immigrants, which further provides a way to analyze the cultural values expressed in the agreement. We include references to SD party platforms, as these have been influential to the content and arguments within the Tidö Agreement. In addition, we examined the video footage of Paludan’s Quran burning outside the Turkish embassy in Sweden to include his statements about the event. To analyze the texts, we used key terms from the right against rights approach, focusing on statements about fundamental freedoms, universal or intrinsic rights, worthiness, citizenship, deservingness, democracy, values, and minority rights, for example.

The set of primary documents was selected because they provide the most relevant information about the key events, reasoning, legal contests over rights, and the cultural values expressed, limited to the 2020 and 2023 time period of the Quran and Tidö Agreement. The main documents, the Tidö Agreement, the Constitution (Instrument of Government), and official statements about the Quran are all available to the public; they are digitized and accessible via the Government Offices of Sweden webpages (Regeringen.se). We used the search tools on the same platform and searched for keywords such as “Tidöavtalet” which brings up the proposal and statements about the proposal, which can be filtered by date, for example. To search for the Constitution, we used “constitution,” which links to the Instrument of Government. To find material on the government’s response to the Quran burnings, we searched “Quran” and found the Prime Minister’s statements by date. We supplemented these documents with national news media accounts, such as Sverige Radio (Radio Sweden), of key events to provide further official references and public statements by key actors.

We indicate whether the documents were published in Swedish or English. For translations of Swedish documents, we relied on the authors’ language skills and translation software. While there are always cultural gaps in translation, the Swedish government documents are intentionally written in clear language to communicate to the public, so we do not think the translation has interfered with the central meaning. We also rely on secondary sources about the right-wing movement and immigration politics in Sweden to fill in the context and background.

Our data and methods have limitations. We draw on public records, as they provide official documentation of key policies and enable the transparency of our data sources. It does mean that our understanding is based on the interpretation of text rather than on face-to-face interviews or observations of key players, which could provide additional motivations or internal tensions we cannot observe through documents. We may miss behind-the-scenes actors who do not appear in official discourse. That said, we aim to show how right-wing movements use legal framing around rights to pursue their social and political goals, and the textual analysis enables us to identify key and repeated themes, values, and logics. In addition, the secondary and historical material add depth to our understanding of social context, which is essential to tease out the logic that underpins contemporary action. For future research, different kinds of methods, including more ethnographic field research on the legal imaginaries of social movements or the legal consciousness of social movement actors that exist outside formal channels, would be useful and could provide a different layer of motivation or emotions, offering insight into how and why right-wing movements turn to law.

Contested rights and democratic freedoms: the Quran crisis

In the summer of 2022, the Swedish government faced a major geopolitical crisis in its first weeks of existence. In reaction to Sweden’s attempt to enter the NATO military alliance, anti-Islam provocateur Rasmus Paludan burned the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. Paludan did not invent this tactic but revived and repopularized it, inspiring similar burnings in Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands (Nissen and Lundstedt Reference Nissen and Lundstedt2024). Paludan’s demonstrations across Sweden and Denmark have triggered riots in Sweden’s poorer, diverse neighborhoods (Switzer Reference Switzer2024) and diplomatic crises (Switzer and Tümler Reference Switzer and Tümler2023). Similarly, another anti-Islam activist who fled persecution, Salwan Momika,Footnote ⁶ an Assyrian Iraqi refugee in Sweden, followed up with his own set of demonstrations, including wrapping the Quran in bacon before burning it, which triggered the storming of the Swedish embassy in Baghdad (France 24 2023). To the backdrop of the ongoing war in Ukraine and Finland’s swift ascension to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan temporarily blocked Sweden’s NATO bid, asserting pressure on the Swedish government to ban the desecrations.

As the central figure in the public spectacles, it is significant that Paludan drew upon the legacy of Denmark’s Mohammad cartoon controversy in his invocation of an unlimited freedom of speech and a right to offend (Switzer and Beauduin Reference Switzer and Beauduin2023). As a former law school faculty member, he consistently asserted his role as an advocate and defender of free speech. In his official application for a permit to demonstrate, he states the reason simply as: “demonstration för yt[t]randefrihet [i] Sverige,” (sic) that is “demonstration for free expression in Sweden” Polisen Reference Polisen2020a). In another application, he categorized the reason for demonstration specifically against Islam with plans to burn the Quran: “Demonstration [mot] islam. Vi brinner koranen,” which translates to “Demonstration against Islam. We burn the Quran” ( Polisen Reference Polisen2020b).

As Paludan carries out these demonstrations simultaneously in the name of free speech and against Islam, which are live-streamed, he does so surrounded by police protection. The police provide protection to Paludan as an individual facing known death threats (B. Polisen Reference Polisen2020b) but also in their role to uphold and guarantee freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and freedom to demonstrate – all protected in the Swedish Constitution (The Swedish Constitution, the Instrument of Government, Chapter 2 on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms). In Sweden, the police are limited in their capacity to deny permits, break up demonstrations, or halt protests, and they can only do so when facing very clear and established security risks (Schultz Reference Schultz2023). In the event outside the Turkish embassy, for example, Swedish police set up a barrier of metal gates with Paludan situated inside a pen, separated from the crowd of onlookers. The state police had a duty to protect Paludan and his right to expression rather than shut down these events.

During the event, Paludan rails against Islam and makes provocative statements about the Prophet Mohammed as he states:

Paludan’s devaluation of life (and by proxy an advocacy of the deprivation of rights, the right to practice religion) here moves from the general to the specific and back again. His initial claim is based on one’s actions: those who commit society’s most heinous crimes have no value. That is to say, Paludan is trying to denigrate a group of people by likening them to rapists, which can be an effective tactic because it takes something that many people would agree with (distaste for rapists) and links it to a more extreme view (Islamophobia).Footnote ⁷ As such, he claims that the founder of Islam is one such “worthless” person. We read Paludan’s reading of history, shared by many on the far right and more centrist political positions, as an effort to delegitimize the religion of Islam, its followers, and its institutions as fruits of a poisonous tree. It is worth stating again that these sentiments, defended as freedom of expression,Footnote ⁸ offered by an apparently solo provocateur, in some sense mirror Swedish public opinion on religious diversity. As noted, majorities in public opinion surveys do not agree that all religions have the same value (Diversity Barometer in Ahmadi et al. Reference Ahmadi, Darvishpour, Ahmadi and Palm2020: 35). Paludan’s hierarchy of value reflects and affirms right-wing conceptions of rights based on worthiness or value rather than equal value for all humans or intrinsic human dignity.

As news and commentary spread about the Quran demonstrations, it is important to note the emergence of counterprotests, organized opposition, and legal cases contesting Paludan’s actions as a form of hate speech rather than as freedom of expression. In Muslim communities, Imams have consistently spoken out against the offensiveness and threats to their religion and identity, and they have pressed for legal changes to Sweden’s Constitution to outlaw the burning of the Quran since 2020 and again in 2023 (Dagens Nyheter Reference Dagens Nyheter2020; The European Conservative 2023). The Civil Rights Defenders, an international human rights advocacy group based in Stockholm, actively opposed the Quran burning, issued public statements condemning the acts, and pursued a legal case against Paludan for hate speech (Civil Rights Defenders 2023). In their public statement against the Quran burnings, the Civil Rights Defenders write:

In contrast to the right-wing legal mobilizations, the Civil Rights Defenders argue that the right not to be discriminated against is fundamental to democratic freedom and sets limits on freedom of expression, further invoking international human rights as the source of rights claims. In this formulation, the burning of the Quran, considered a sacred text, can incite violence against a specific religious group, inhibit their freedom to associate, and infringe upon the fundamental right to religious freedom.

As the Quran burnings continued through the summer of 2023, Prime Minister Kristersson announced Sweden was facing its most serious security threat since the Second World War (Regeringen 2023). The terror threat level was raised, and shortly after, two brothers were arrested in Hamburg for planning to bomb a Swedish church in retaliation for the Quran burnings. In the face of these threats, the Stockholm police banned any burnings of the Quran; for two months, they refused to issue any protest permits that included the act. The ban was short-lived, as pro-freedom of speech groups challenged the ban in Sweden’s administrative court (Civil Rights Defenders 2023), which ruled that the police’s failure to prove that the demonstration itself (where the Quran would be burned) was a public safety risk meant the demonstration must be allowed. An abstract heightened terror threat was insufficient grounds to halt the demonstration (Förvaltningsrätten i Stockholm Reference i Stockholm2023).Footnote ⁹

Compelled to respond, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, the Moderate party leader, delivered a public statement that upheld freedom of expression as the ultimate freedom in democracy. While expressing disdain for public burnings, he nevertheless made a strong case for protecting Swedish democracy through freedom of expression, even as he acknowledged the importance of religious freedom. In the “Statement by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson,” he says:

As the Prime Minister tried to balance competing demands and rights, the right-wing government’s coalition partners were more direct in their anti-Muslim positions. Jimmie Åkesson, party leader of SD, has repeatedly stated that Muslims pose an existential threat to Sweden and that Islam is incompatible with Swedish values. In his 2023 Summer Talk (Sommartal), which is a highly visible national address given by all party leaders outlining their goals and reflections on the state of the country, he condemned the attacks on Swedish embassies in response to the Quran burnings and affirmed freedom of expression as a core value of democracy. Åkesson asked:

This speech highlights the logic and content of how Åkesson casts Muslims as a colonizing threat against core values in Sweden and to Western democracy more generally. For Åkesson, the international conflicts and disorder in Sweden are all brought about because immigrants have brought their problems into the country, tried to impose their religious practices on others, and refused to assimilate. For our case, again, it is critical that Åkesson formulates this threat to democracy as a threat to freedom of expression.

This argument is repeated across the right-wing parties. For example, the Sweden Democrats’ highest-ranking political appointment, Richard Jomshof, chair of the Riksdag’s Justice Committee, consistently called the Quran burners “stupid” but emerged as the firmest supporter of their tactics in Sweden’s parliament. He stated:

Here, Jomshof explicitly connects the need to stand up for democracy in response to the perceived anti-democratic threat of Islam. The way to stand up for democracy is to support freedom of expression. Likewise, in her Summer Talk to the nation, right-wing coalition partner and Christian Democrat party leader Ebba Busch stated:

Busch’s language suggests that those reacting negatively, at times violently, to the desecration of a religious text are undeserving of Swedish hospitality or citizenship. Here she implicitly ties support for freedom of expression with the worthiness of citizenship. In her view, those who do not or cannot demonstrate support for these freedoms, even if they find offense, are not welcome in Sweden.

As the public debate over the Quran burnings illustrates, right-wing movements and party figures consistently backed freedom of expression over religious freedom and portrayed Muslims as incompatible and threatening to Swedish society. This contest over rights in 2023 echoed, if not vindicated, the long-standing formulation from the far-right party platform: “immigration from countries where there is a different view of freedom of expression, secularization, and freedoms and rights also means stress for Swedish democracy” (Sverigedemokraternas 2022). As we show below, this logic underpins right-wing efforts to restrict migration for those who do not support fundamental Swedish values, and it contributes to a hostile environment for practicing Muslims, infringing on a fundamental right to religion in Sweden.

Conditional rights: Swedish values, lack of character, and removal in the Tidö agreement

Over their 15 years in the Swedish Parliament, the Sweden Democrats have consistently linked immigration to threats against democracy, have pushed for policies to remove unwanted migrants from the country, including but not limited to migrants from Muslim-majority countries, and claim to be defenders of democracy by doing so.Footnote ¹⁰ Their ultimate goal is to reduce immigration to Sweden, even though they make conditional allowances. SD’s long-standing anti-immigrant approach and specific emphasis on migrants from Muslim countries matter, as SD shaped much of the migration control discussed in the Tidö Agreement.

For our rights against rights analysis, SD offers a conception of rights that are earned and conditional rather than intrinsic or absolute. Specifically, they connect rights with the duties of good citizenship and Swedish values. This configuration enables broader right-wing challenges to migrants’ rights, restricts access to immigration and citizenship, and plans to revoke rights when noncitizens fail to meet the conditions.

We can see this set of formulations in SD’s party platform, “This is What We Want” (published in English), as they argue:

To build a safe society, SD advocates for a “serious migration policy” in which:

They continue on this same note but introduce an important component on rights. Here, they conceptualize rights as duties and how immigrants must earn rights in Sweden. As we outline below, they advocate for shared values, language requirements, and civic lessons as conditions to citizenship, which have not previously been part of the pathway to citizenship in Sweden (Aliens Act 2005). To prevent welfare dependency and promote return, the Tidö reforms have increased the level of required financial stability (e.g., those with work permits must earn 80 percent of the Swedish median salary; see Migration Agency 2025a), which makes it more difficult for many labor migrants, regardless of skill, to stay in the country.

For a safe society, they explain:

As they foreground duties to follow Swedish rules and values, they counterpose the threat of Islamism with Sweden, which they argue will persevere because it is a “land of democracy and equality,” implying Islam is not conducive to those values.

As SD made a significant impact on the 2022 election, with over 17 percent of the vote, they became a governing partner to the right-wing coalition, which would not have been able to form a government without them. Subsequently, SD leveraged its position to shape the goals, logics, and policies in the Tidö Agreement, especially the sections on migration called the Directive on Migration and Integration, designed to restrict migration and remove noncitizens deemed to lack character or Swedish values, bristande vandel, in Swedish. The Tidö proposals apply to all noncitizens and immigrants, including young people born and raised in Sweden with foreign parents, and are not limited to noncitizens from Muslim-majority countries. As illustrated above and below, the central driving force is to reduce the presence of immigrants in the country, with an emphasis on compatibility with Swedishness and Swedish values, proposals that are likely but not exclusively going to impact non-Western migrants. We outline key proposals below.

Affirming Swedish values

The Directive on Migration and Integration begins with its stated goal to bring about a paradigm shift in asylum policy in Sweden. As Point 1.1. Purpose and Goals states: “Skapa ett paradigmskifte i synen på asylmottagande, för att utgångspunkten ska vara att skydd för den som flyr en konflikt eller kris ska erbjudas tillfälligt” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 29). In English: create a paradigm shift in the view of asylum reception, so that the starting point is that protection for those fleeing a conflict or crisis should be offered temporarily. (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 29). Their aim is to radically change the country’s approach so that the right to remain, that is the right to stay in the country legally with a residence permit (Aliens Act 2005; Migration Agency 2025a), becomes temporary and conditional. The first point continues: “the introduction of a requirement-based integration policy, where those who have been in Sweden for a long time must take responsibility for becoming part of the Swedish society” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 29). It is along these lines we can see how the conception of rights as earned and conditional has influenced the requirement for the newly arrived and migrants to demonstrate a certain level of integration to remain in the country.

According to the Tidö Agreement, migrants will demonstrate an appropriate, quantifiable level of integration by their ability to pass a national curriculum called “Introduction to Society.” Although this curriculum has not yet been developed, it will eventually provide civic lessons based on core Swedish values (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 46). Proposed as a Constitutional Amendment, this section of the Tidö Agreement states that the newly arrived should participate in locally run civic orientation courses “where increased emphasis is to be placed on gender equality, women’s rights, freedom of religion and other fundamental values of society” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 46). This civic orientation would be mandatory and conditional to receive “subsistence allowance” or “daily allowances from the Swedish Migration Board” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 46).

As the Tidö Agreement seeks to restrict migration and make the right to remain more tenuous and conditional, it seeks to reinforce key Swedish values. For example, in the section on “Limitation of resettlement to Sweden,” which proposes to reduce the number of quota refugees to 900, down from 5000 in 2023 (AIDA (Asylum Information Database) 2025),Footnote ¹¹ Sweden aims to “set requirements for the UN agency UNHCR on the basis of which quota refugees shall be selected” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 35). It continues:

Sweden will require quota refugees to demonstrate compatibility with Swedish values and integration and will prioritize women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people. Likewise, in the section on Family Reunification, the Tidö Agreement seeks to define the family as “narrow as EU law and international law allows” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 40) but remains neutral in terms of sexuality:

The inclusion of protections for LGBTQ+ persons speaks to the Swedish values of protecting vulnerable sexual minorities who may be seeking refuge and asylum. Gay rights have become integral to constructions of Swedish national identity, not only for their inclusionary values, but also because they have become a way to create social distance with non-Western cultures (Kehl Reference Kehl2020; Sörberg Reference Sörberg2017). Kehl (Reference Kehl2020) shows specifically how right-wing movements in Sweden have constructed symbolic boundaries around LGBTQ+ people as potential victims of dangerous and threatening racialized others. In our case, the inclusion of LGBTQ+ as part of the definition of family and as a priority for quota refugees is significant, as it promotes one set of democratic ideals, support for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, while limiting the rights of another, including the right of quota refugees to stay and settle in Sweden. And in contrast to the right against rights in Latin America or in Central Europe, which are fiercely traditionalist, anti-gay rights, and trans- and homophobic (Ritholtz and Mesquita Reference Ritholtz, Mesquita, Payne, Zulver and Escoffier2023), the Swedish and other Northern European far-right movements explicitly connect their support for LGBTQ+ rights as part of their liberal democratic credentials and nationalist projects (Farris Reference Farris2017).

Removal

The right-wing coalition promised and is now trying to deliver a paradigm shift in migration policy. One of the most radical departures from current practice in Sweden is the stated goal to expand and increase removal and the creation of new conditions for expulsion. Under current practice, noncitizens and those without a legal right to remain in the country can be deported for criminal offenses and removed if they pose a credible or known security risk (Migratiosverket 2024; Aliens Act 2005, Section 8). By contrast, the Tidö Agreement goes beyond convention by proposing to introduce “lack of character,” or bristande vandel in Swedish, as a legitimate and compelling reason to remove a noncitizen from the country. The Tidö Agreement states:

This suggests a weaponization of cultural values in the weakening of rights, highlighting the paradox of relying on repressive means such as expulsion to protect Swedish values. In other words, the right to remain in the country may be taken away if a migrant is shown to lack character. A failure to properly comply with Swedish values or the Swedish “way of life” could also lead to removal from the country. Specifically, the Tidö states:

Here, the proposal defines lack of good conduct as related to criminality, but significantly, this condition is not tied to a criminal conviction (Migrationsverket 2024; Aliens Act 2005, Section 8). Criminality is broadly defined to include association with criminal organizations such as gangs, substance abuse, prostitution (selling sex is not illegal in Sweden), and participation in violent or extreme groups. In our case, we emphasize the obligation to respect and demonstrate Swedish values as a sign of good conduct. Expulsions here can be generated for threatening Swedish values or a Swedish way of life, which is not specified or defined.

Furthermore, the Tidö Agreement seeks to expand deportation even for those with known “connections to Sweden” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 45), which means that for those who have established family or work connections, conventionally considered evidence of integration, may no longer be protected by these conditions. And for those who have not demonstrated integration, the Tidö Agreement proposes to increase voluntary repatriation and “re-migration,” especially for those who have connections to another country, as “this applies to in particular to people who have not been integrated into Swedish society in terms of self-sufficiency, language, or other cultural factors” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 45). The Agreement is careful to note that an investigation into these proposals is necessary to ensure these reforms are compliant and can provide a legal framework that will fit within the Swedish Constitution, EU law, the European Convention, and other international law commitments (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 39).

And finally, for our case, the Tidö Agreement proposes to tighten citizenship requirements and revoke citizenship based on worthiness and earned rights. The Minister of Migration, Johan Forssell of the Moderate Party, recently explained that “citizenship is something that should be earned,” not given without stricter requirements (von Arndt Reference von Arndt2025). The Tidö Agreement proposes to increase residence from 5 to 8 years and require “increased knowledge about Swedish society and culture,” including a language requirement, and “self-sufficiency” in terms of financial security (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 38–39). In addition, the agreement proposes to revoke citizenship for dual citizens who have threatened Sweden by committing “systemic crimes” or who were granted citizenship “as a result of incorrect information” (Sveriges Regeringen (Tidö Agreement) 2022: 38–39).

While drawn quite narrowly, this proposal alters the conditions of naturalized citizenship, and it seeks to weaken, if not remove, legal protections from those who were previously granted the right to remain and rights of citizenship. Citizenship revocation or denaturalization is not operational because the legality and procedures are still being investigated in the legislative process. The outcome is not guaranteed. In this moment, it serves an important communicative function, reaffirming the concept of earned citizenship and the centrality of Swedishness to citizenship. It unsettles previous claims to rights and, if enacted, could create second-class citizenship for foreigners, who would be continually assessed in terms of their Swedishness with serious consequences for failure. Taken together, the Tidö Agreement proposals outlined above are likely to generate new forms of insecurity for noncitizens and undermine integration and attachment to society.