So Sweden elected a conservative prime minister four years ago who promised to send criminal migrants back to their home countries, and you'll never believe what happened next.
Violent crime went down. Way down. Particularly gang violence, according to a new report out this week.
You totally believe it, don't you?
When he campaigned for the PM spot in 2022, Ulf Kristersson — then a member of the Swedish parliament or riksdag — said of violent acts: "If you commit such crimes in Sweden and are not a Swedish citizen, you should be thrown out of the country.”
Crime, La Monde reported at the time, was "at the heart of Sweden's electoral campaign."
And no wonder.
By the summer of '22, escalating gang shootings and even bombings were commonplace in what had once been a country better known for spas than jihads. In total, Sweden suffered 361 shootings, 62 shooting deaths, and 90 bombings. The problem with migrant gangs escalated so quickly that Swedish authorities didn't bother to record bombings until 2018.
By the last election, even the governing soft-on-crime Social Democrats promised tougher measures, but that wasn't enough to stop Kristersson from putting together a coalition big enough to oust the SD.
Kristersson wasn't kidding about getting tough against thugs. Since becoming PM, Sweden has joined NATO and, between 2023 and 2025, deported more than 31,000 migrants. His government "pursued a combination of tougher criminal penalties, additional police funding, expanded wiretapping authority and changes intended to prevent organized criminal groups from recruiting young people," YourNews reported on Tuesday. "Among those measures was a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility to 14, aimed in part at disrupting gangs’ use of teenagers in violent conflicts."
Stockholm doesn't break out the individual stats, but the most likely recipients of one-way tickets out are believed to be Syrians and Afghans.
As it turns out — and again, you won't be shocked by this — sending foreign criminals home is just as effective as locking up homegrown thugs. But the numbers must be seen to be believed.
Shootings are down "by 80 per cent since their 2022 peak," the Financial Times reported on Monday, and Kristersson reduced "the number of asylum seekers to its lowest in four decades."
It was apparently a huge deal earlier this year when one Swedish paper reported "No shootings in May."
“The fact that you have headlines saying no shootings at all this month: it says something,” Kristersson told the FT.
Oddly enough, bombings spiked in 2025, and the trend doesn't look much better for 2026. If I had to hazard a guess, the more hardcore elements are the most difficult to find and deport, and also the most likely to use extreme measures like bombs. And sure enough, FT reported that "Rawa Majid, a criminal known as the Kurdish Fox, who heads the most notorious gang, Foxtrot — remains free and is presumed to be living in Iran after stays in Turkey and Iraq."
Still, Sweden holds another national election on Sunday, and the Social Democrats could very well take power again. “There’s a lot of discussion about the Winston Churchill effect,” Mattias Karlsson, the nationalist Sweden Democrats' chief ideologue, said.
Having all but won the war, will Swedish voters reject the man who got them this far?
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