On the night of Tuesday, May 28 to Wednesday, May 29, a car parked in front of the Skövde mosque, which opened in 2023, just outside the town between Gothenburg and Stockholm. The driver threw the corpse of a wild boar against the building, nestled in a small wood, before driving off, unaware that the surveillance cameras installed by the Bosnian Islamic Association had filmed the action. "Unfortunately, we're used to this sort of thing," said Mirza Babovic, 66, an employee of the association. He reeled off incidents such as Islamophobic tags painted outside the former prayer hall, the remains of a pig dumped on the building site and the windows of a container smashed.

This time, Imam Smajo Sahat, who reported it, decided not to publicize the incident, "so as not to give publicity to its perpetrator, nor to give ideas to others." He did not want to worry his followers either. But local journalists got wind of the incident and before long, the national media began to report it, "no doubt because it happened just a few days before the European elections," said the imam, still dismayed by the violence of the discourse against Islam and Muslims during the campaign.

In November 2023, far-right leader Jimmie Akesson – whose Sweden Democrats party has been allied with the right-wing coalition government since October 2022 – declared that he wanted to destroy mosques, ban the construction of new buildings and wiretap Muslim religious communities in order to combat "Islamism." His right-hand man, Richard Jomshof, president of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, followed suit, calling for a ban on all symbols of Islam in public spaces, which he likened to "the swastika."

On social media, party officials have constantly denounced the "Islamization of Sweden," claiming that "Swedes are on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country." This rhetoric is not new. Back in 2009, a year before his party entered parliament, Akesson asserted that Muslims were "the biggest threat to Sweden."

This line has now been taken up by other parties. Just before the European elections, Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democrats and number two in the government, said that Sweden had "a major problem with the rise of Islam," claiming in an interview with the newspaper Dagens Nyheter that some Muslims were prepared to "stone women who don't wear the veil" or "throw homosexuals off skyscrapers."

These remarks shocked Mesud Babic, 47, who had come to attend Friday prayers. This employee of the Volvo plant in Skövde is fed up with seeing Muslims constantly portrayed as potential "criminals or terrorists." His two daughters, aged 15 and 16, no longer want him to post photos of them on social media when they take part in activities at the mosque: "They say they'll be made fun of at school. They're also afraid that it will haunt them later on when they're looking for a job."

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