Far-right Swedish politician Rebecka Fallenkvist has been suspended from her political post following comments about Anne Frank being a sexual deviant. What started as her party status being put "under review" after the incident, later became a full suspension for the politician.
Fallenkvist's comments about Anne Frank
“Fifty pages in and so far Anne Frank has only struck me as debauched, the horniness itself,” Sweden Democrat (SD) Rebecka Fallenkvist wrote on Instagram earlier this month. She tagged this post with a song by Kanye West, who has also been in the limelight for a recent influx of antisemitism.
The Swedish Jewish community responded with their outrage, along with Israel's ambassador to Sweden. “We are obviously outraged and disgusted by this,” Nina Tojzner, secretary-general of the Jewish youth organization in Sweden told The Jerusalem Post.
Tojzner’s organization shared a press release, stating that “normalizing a treacherous use of language and shameless trivialization of the suffering of Holocaust victims is indecent and undignified. This is even more serious, coming from a popularly elected politician who enjoys great influence.”I strongly condemn this despicable insult, disrespectful of the memory of Anne Frank. It comes in sharp contrast to #Sweden’s efforts to preserve the memory of the #Holocaust. Unfortunately, there are many more bad weeds that must be uprooted. pic.twitter.com/ircMIVWbQ8
— Ziv Nevo Kulman (@zivnk) October 15, 2022
The Swedish media personality-turned-politician later turned to social media to respond to the initial messaging of the story, following her suspension by the Swedish Democrats and her employer, Riks. Her Instagram account has since been scrubbed clean.
Fallenkvist wrote a response to the Swedish Dagens Nyheter newspaper that “the book is a moving depiction of human goodness and evil. Anne, who in the first chapters is like any other young girl, lives her life in peace and finds an interest in boys (which I highlighted), in contrast with the evil of Nazism. My story was aimed at the good and humaneness of Anne – not to minimize the evil she was exposed to.”
However, her other personal social media posts do not shed these same emotions. She turned to social media to bid farewell to her role in office. Her social media tells a story of a person not with remorse, but as someone who had an opportunity taken from her that she hopes to retrieve again after the dust settles.