Shortly after the first TV debate in the campaign for next year’s Swedish election, there was a startling announcement. Anna-Karin Hatt, the leader of the Centre party, the standard-bearer for liberal centrism in Swedish politics, announced her resignation, citing an unbearable number of threats and harassment.

Hatt was an emerging voice in Swedish politics, but had been able to lead the Centre party for only five months before she made a speech announcing that she felt forced to leave her job for the safety of her family. Her speech was short on specifics, but she referred to clear physical threats “not just from trolls behind a screen, it has come much closer than that”. She said she felt obliged to look over her shoulder in public spaces and no longer felt safe in her own home.

Hatt’s announcement came just three years after her popular predecessor, Annie Lööf, left the party leadership for the same reason: extremist hate, neo-Nazi threats, online trolls and offline stalkers. Lööf was about to deliver a speech at a political festival in Gotland in 2022 when another speaker at the event, a politically active psychiatrist, was stabbed to death. The man convicted of her murder had planned to kill Lööf.

In interviews at the time of her resignation, Lööf said that she felt huge relief at having got out of politics without being physically harmed. The way she talked about her experience of public life sounded less like politics in a healthy democracy than a panicked swim among sharks.

Now, with yet another liberal woman prematurely departing Swedish politics, we need to be clear about what is happening here: women are being chased out of public life, by unconstrained hate groups, online trolls and far-right extremism. In one of the world’s strongest democracies, this is becoming the new normal.

Hatt’s experience follows a global pattern, where vile men try to assert their power over women in public life by threatening to physically hurt or kill them. A loud minority of extremists are mobilised by an increasingly toxic and unregulated social media environment and the rise of authoritarian far-right parties.

Despite the alarming nature of these threats, establishment conservatives in the Swedish government have mostly dismissed the concerns. Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, nonchalantly said that Hatt should have been more “thick skinned”. Most rightwing pundits echoed him, implying that Hatt was simply not up to the task, that the onus was on her to toughen up.

If their logic is that death threats and stalkers have to be priced in if you want to participate in public life, then we are likely to see fewer people doing so. And those Swedes who are most likely to be the targets of attack: women, immigrants and minorities are the ones most likely to avoid seeking public office. This would be a crushing retreat for democracy in one of the world’s most open societies.

After Hatt’s resignation, Lööf wrote a vivid description of the kind of threats that had forced her to leave her job in 2022. “Death threats, empty bullet casings in my mailbox, Nazis outside my home, hate campaigns on social media, threats against my family. I have sat face to face with a man who planned to kill me – because of my values. A man who has been convicted of murder and terrorist crimes for preparing to commit murder. A man who began tracking me as early as 2013. These are the terrible downsides of public office.”

Her refusal to form a government with a far-right party was the reason for the vile attacks, she claimed.

Amandah Andersson, policy chief at the Centre party’s women’s organisation, Centerkvinnorna, tells me that Hatt “inherited” a part of the [online] environment that was directed at Lööf. “As a woman, there is a bigger risk of exposure to harsh threats and hatred,” she says.

Much of the contempt for Hatt and the Centre party comes from far-right nationalists, who are upset about these politicians’ relatively liberal views on immigration. But it also comes from traditional conservatives, who are frustrated that the Centre party no longer wants to govern with the ruling Moderate party, which now relies on an alliance with the far-right Sweden Democrats for a governing majority.

Last year, an investigation by Swedish TV4 revealed that the Sweden Democrats were operating a vast network of troll farms to systematically harass and abuse political opponents, and spread false information.

The Sweden Democrats own TV network, Riks, has consistently demonised the Centre party, and particularly Lööf. She was called “Sharia Annie” with “sociopath eyes”, for staying true to her defence of immigration. Riks has more than a million regular viewers in Sweden.

Despite its reputation for safety and stability, Sweden has a recent history of brutal political violence. Prime minister Olof Palme was murdered in 1986. In 2003, the foreign minister Anna Lindh, also a Social Democrat, was murdered in a department store in central Stockholm. In 2011, 77 young leftwing activists were murdered in a far-right massacre in Utøya, in neighbouring Norway, but several of the victims and survivors were Swedish. The attack left a huge scar on all Scandinavian politics, with immeasurably chilling effects for new generations of activists.

Targeting women in politics with abuse is a global issue. Already in 2016, a report which looked at data in 39 countries, showed that psychological violence affected four in every five female parliamentarians. Sexually demeaning remarks affected 65% of those surveyed, “followed by threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction (44%)”, according to the report.

Sanna Marin, who became prime minister of Finland in 2019, was the target of more online abuse than any other Finnish politician. According to a Nato Stratcom report, female ministers in Finland receive about 10 times the number of abusive messages on social media compared to male counterparts.

During the two decades in which I covered US politics, I saw how quickly online abuse can transform into physical violence. From the attempted murder of the Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, to a far-right terrorist plot against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, the attacks on the home of Nancy Pelosi to the recent murder of Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman.

Similar patterns are emerging in European politics. In 2024, a report from the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) showed that seven in 10 women in European politics had suffered abuse and harassment. In many countries, including Germany and Ireland, numbers were even higher.

We should also consider how this is connected to the global far-right’s escalating attacks on DEI and diversity programmes, which are often less about affirmative action, than questioning the mere presence of women and people of colour as public officials in any public spaces.

Of course it is possible to allay fears about extremism in Swedish politics by citing the country’s ranking as a stable democracy, its high levels of democratic participation and commitment to gender equality.

But this is precisely why it’s so concerning that another prominent Swedish woman has been forced out. Even in one of the most stable democracies in the world, the threat of extremist violence is transforming political representation.