Far-right extremist narratives in Canadian and Swedish COVID-19 protests: a comparative case study of the Freedom Movement and Freedom Convoy

ABSTRACT

This comparative case study of the Freedom Movement in Sweden and the Freedom Convoy in Canada provides insights into the processes of transnationalization involved in the (re)production of far-right narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the online media of these protest movements we explore the extent to which the political and cultural context shaped far-right meta narratives and more universal concerns around the pandemic. The study finds significant similarities in how protest narratives in the two countries were constructed and appropriated to intersect with far-right extremism and anti-establishment ideas but also that these narratives were repurposed to make sense in two national contexts characterized by stark differences in the level of restrictions imposed and curtailment of civic rights. Unpacking the local/global intricacies of these narratives helps us understand the ubiquity of contemporary anti-government and anti-establishment discourse propelled by the far-right but also its malleability and flexibility in terms of how it is made to fit different political contexts and scenarios across liberal democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 protests
• far-right extremism
• extremist narratives
• conspiracy theories
• transnational movements

Introduction: COVID-19, social unrest and far-right extremism

The pandemic generated civil unrest and large-scale protest movements around the world. Across Europe and North America, protest groups liaised under the broad anti-COVID regulations umbrella. Indeed, COVID-19 was a phase of revelation and intensification of social strains, in which social inequalities became more evident and institutional responsibilities in the overall management of society more apparent. In countries across the world, unprecedented levels of COVID-19 skepticism (and denialism) allowed for what the Canadian Angus Reid Institute and the University of Alberta have called a ‘shadow pandemic’ (Tinwei Lam, 2020; see also Argentino & Amarasingam, 2020). The result was a deep economic recession and growing social discontent, often turned into denialism, from which loosely organized online groups and offline protests emerged and were frequently co-opted by violent actors. In particular, the popular protests challenging public health restrictions, lockdowns and vaccinations were hijacked by right-wing extremist groups, who used disinformation and conspiracy theories¹ to promote anti-democratic and anti-institutional narratives and agendas (Gerbaudo, 2020; Molas & Bar-On, 2021). The success of the penetration of these ideas into the mainstream was in part afforded by the global increase in online activity during social isolation, which fostered rigid black-and-white worldviews while encouraging in-group conformity and hostility towards specific ‘out-groups’.

Davies et al. (2021) identify three key reasons the far-right was uniquely positioned to exploit the pandemic. First, at the heart of the discourse surrounding COVID-19 were a number of issues that are well treaded territory for the far-right, including distrust in government, ideas of government overreach, and betrayal. Second, the far-right thrives in times of crisis and was therefore uniquely positioned to harness anti-government resentment in the climate of fear and political tension inevitably caused by the pandemic. In the US context, Trump’s stance on the pandemic which involved a mix of diminishing its severity and scapegoating was also a contributing factor, and Trump’s spillover effects on far-right movements elsewhere, including in Sweden (Teitelbaum, 2019) and Canada (Perry & Scrivens, 2019), are well documented.

A wealth of studies are emerging on the organizational and discursive alliances forged between anti-lockdown protests and far-right movements across liberal democracies (see, e.g. Curley et al. (2022) for a study on Ireland, Dyrendal (2023) and Sarnecki et al. (2023) on Sweden, Denmark and Norway; McNeil-Wilson (2020) on France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the UK, and ISD’s country reports on Netherlands (2021b), Germany(2021a) , Canada (2021c) the US (2022b) and Italy (2022a)). In Canada specifically, previous research shows that many of the activists involved in the Freedom Convoy were involved in already existing anti-government and anti-immigrant movements. This includes Yellow Vests Canada (a pro-oil and pipeline group that spread antisemitic conspiracy theories); the legacy and remnant groupings of the Canadian chapter of the Islamophobic and anti-immigrant Soldiers of Odin; as well as other individual actors inspired by far-right extremist narratives (Amarasingam et al., 2021).

Yet studies addressing the relationship between COVID-19, right-wing extremism, and street mobilization from a comparative perspective are still limited. This paper sets out to fill this gap in knowledge with a comparative study of home-grown anti-COVID-19 movements and their transnational connections in Canada and Sweden. In particular, we focus on the Canadian Freedom Convoy and the Swedish Freedom Movement, asking how comparable such movements are, given they emerged under the same global social strains and developed in fairly similar societies. According to Harris-Hogan et al. (2020), focusing on similar societies will allow for a ‘more controlled comparison of variables’, leading to the gathering of more relatable data and thus to a more nuanced analysis (p. 79). A good illustration in this regard is Hutchinson et al (2021), who found that thousands of Australian and Canadian right-wing groups on Facebook shared a wide range of mobilizing themes in comparable socio-historical contexts. This research suggests that the comparative analysis of shared extremist narratives can inform coordinated transnational efforts against emerging threats that, while acknowledging context-dependent concerns, also appreciate the possibility for political agendas to surpass the nation. Through a Canada-Sweden comparative analysis of social mobilizations and online extremist narratives we examine how local concerns prevail; mobilizing themes repeat across our cases; and how they are reproduced, adapted, or changed.

With this focus, we take an interest in the ways in which far-right extremist narratives and conspiracy theories bleed into more general popular discontent with restrictions and lock downs and the protests which mobilized in Sweden and Canada, respectively. We ask: How did far-right narratives merge with COVID-19 protests in Canada and Sweden? Around which actors, topics, (visual) symbols and conspiratorial narratives does this convergence occur? What are the main similarities and differences in the thematic patterns and their articulation online across the two countries? What do these similarities and differences tell us of the translocal features and transnational aspirations of the protest movements? Empirically, the cross-national comparative analysis draws on a multi-modal data set of online content from Reddit, Telegram, Facebook and YouTube posted by key actors in the two largest protest mobilizations: the Freedom Convoy in Canada and The Freedom Movement in Sweden.

Key concepts and theoretical starting points

This paper develops under a twofold theoretical framework that helps us analyze how far-right ideas and conspiratorial thinking were part of the COVID-19 mobilizations from a comparative perspective. First, to operationalize the notion of extremist narratives and understand the shared narrative patterns of the two protest movements, we draw on Berger’s (2018) definition of extremism as a spectrum of beliefs, rather than a simple or ‘fixed destination’ (p. 68). Drawing on social identity theory, he argues that whether violent or nonviolent, extremist movements revolve around the same ‘value proposition’, which holds that the extremist in-group offers a solution to a threat-based crisis that is rooted in the existence of an out group. We take cues from his work to understand extremism as ‘the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an outgroup’ (2018, p. 44). Here, hostile actions might designate a range of behaviors, from discriminatory behavior, hate speech, and harassment to violence and even genocide. At the heart of all extremist ideologies and movements then, are narratives fleshing out identity constructions around the demarcation of in-groups and out-groups, and around crisis-solution constructs based on those group-identity definitions. These shared narrative structures make it possible for us to compare the two movements despite their different orientations, partly different demands and variations in digital practices and platforms. Extremist narratives can take on different, often shape-shifting forms, and be built around ideas ranging from conspiracy, impurity and dystopia to existential threat, and apocalypse (Berger, 2018). Among these, conspiracy is however one of the most important and recurring narratives, revolving around ‘the belief that out-groups are engaged in secret actions to control in-group outcomes’ (p. 66). A large body of research suggests that political extremism predicts a general susceptibility to conspiracy theory belief (see, e.g. Amarasingam, 2019; van Prooijen et al., 2015; Warner & Neville-Shepard, 2014) and recent research on this interplay has documented the consistency and frequency with which right-wing extremist conspiracy theories kept appearing in pandemic protests across the world, suggesting they play an important ideological role and function as a multiplier in the process of radicalization (Farinelli, 2021).

Obviously, the connection between conspiracy theories and extremist attitudes and beliefs is not new. Extremist ideologies have always been fueled with conspiracist belief systems, epitomized most prominently perhaps by long standing antisemitic ideas of a Jewish controlled world order which continue to permeate much of far-right extremist ideology today. But the moment of disruption caused by the pandemic, the socio-political and economic consequences in Europe caused by the war in Ukraine, along with developments in digital technology, are fundamentally altering, perpetuating, and amplifying conspiracy beliefs in new and still unexplored ways. Indeed, extremist narratives construed around conspiratorial beliefs found fertile ground among more mainstream audiences during the pandemic (Davies et al., 2021), and whereas the internet has always been a hub for conspiracism, the pandemic prompted a development in which these started to circulate in the digital mainstream. The widespread proliferation of conspiracy narratives during and in the aftermath of the pandemic warrants an urgent need for scholarship to better understand the normalization of conspiracies and how they operate as part of everyday political discourse (West et al., 2021).

Second, the paper has ambitions to contribute to the growing literature on the transnationalization of social movements. The internet and social media in particular are often highlighted as crucial contributing factors to the construction of cross-border collective identities and interpretive frames among activists (Caiani et al., 2012). Yet few studies have systematically investigated the role of online media in the transnationalization of the far-right in terms of not only interactions and sustained international ties, but also regarding the production of thematic foci and interpretive frameworks. As a result, little is known about the transnationalization of far-right movements and how the social media efforts of actors in different countries compare (Froio & Ganesh, 2019). To unpack the local/global intricacies of the shared narratives at the heart of the interpretive frames around which the Covid19 movements were forged, we draw on the notion of ‘translocality’ and transnationality in social movement communication. The notion of translocality allows us to examine how the ideas and narratives that inform social movement mobilizations are shaped by ‘their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of other locales’, rather than as objects that remain stable through time and space (Brickell & Datta, 2011, p. 4). Thus, translocality recognizes the capacity for local social movements to adapt narratives that go beyond their immediate national contexts. This concept is useful in showing how protest movements are multi-layered and influenced by the broader transnational contexts into which they are embedded and never simply straightforwardly copy-pasted from one national context to the other. Following McSwiney et al. (2021), we consider transnationality in social movement communication, and in particular in its visual form, along three key parameters. The first mode of transnationality captures the process of explicit circulation and reproduction of specific images across country borders, such as the circulation of identical memes between different countries. The second type of transnationality is established through direct communicative references across borders within the protest material itself. The third type of transnationality is the spread of similar (visual) protest material across countries, by actors participating in the same discourse at the same time, irrespective of direct interactions. While McSwiney et al. (2021) focus on digital images exclusively, we approach the visual material in our data using the broader notion of ‘visual protest material’ (Philips, 2012) to understand the motley array of visuals circulated in and across the online and offline spaces of the protest events. Such visuals may include anything from pictures of banners, protest signs, flags and graffiti in the streets (as remediated online) to digital images such as gifs or memes spread in the various online channels from which data have been sourced.

Methodology

We adopt a qualitative case study methodology drawing on narrative inquiry to compare extremist narratives emerging around the pandemic in two national contexts. We collected data from a number of different platforms to inform our analysis of the key conspiratorial narratives and far-right ideas emerging from the COVID-19 protest movements in Sweden and Canada. As such, this paper is not an analysis of the movements’ social media activity or the role of specific platforms in the mobilizations. Rather, we analyze a wide variety of social media content, across countries and platforms, to get a better sense of the narratives through which actors in the movements ‘storied’ and made sense of the crisis, its cause and solutions. As we are looking for narratives, not platform specific practices, the differences in the nature and scope of the data are of little importance to addressing the questions at the heart of this study.

Data sets

The paper draws on two extensive data sets obtained from a variety of social media platforms to get a clear picture of the types of narratives that circulated around the COVID-19 protest movements and the actors involved. The Swedish sample includes a combination of data from Telegram, YouTube and Facebook. With the strategic selection of content from these platforms we capture the digital footprints of the so-called Freedom Movement. We started the data selection process by going through the main channel Frihetsrörelsen [Freedom Movement] on Telegram using exponential discriminative snowball sampling techniques to include additional relevant channels that were frequently linked to in the main channel. The additional Telegram channels and super groups ultimately included were: Frihetscentralen [Freedom central], Freebite, Vaken.se, [Awake.se] Scandinavian Freedom Events, Frihetsrörelsens kommentarer, [Comments of the Freedom Movement], VI ÄR FRIA! [WE ARE FREE!] and Frihetsaktivism [Freedom activism]. Telegram data were collected from 2 February 2021, when the channel was set up prior to the first street protests in March 2021, until May 2022, a few months after the final large-scale protest in January of that year. This provided us with a total of 51,270 posts across the 7 groups and supergroups. The selection of YouTube channels was informed and externally validated by the results of another related study in which we map the networks and connective media practices of so-called far-right alternative influencers on YouTube in Sweden. The network analysis revealed a cluster of channels related to the Freedom movement which figured in close proximity to the network of the far-right channels - in other words they link to each other in various ways either through hyperlinking within or outside the video or within the video through guest appearances or actual mentions of each other’s channels. We include the YouTube channels (6) and appurtenant videos (989) around which the network analysis clearly indicated a convergence between the Freedom movement and far-right actors in the country as secondary data adding context and depth to the narratives identified in the Telegram channels. Efforts to enrich and help unpack and contextualize the primary Telegram data also involved conducting observations of interactions and posts in two Facebook groups central to the organization of the protests: ‘Keep Sweden Free’ and ‘The Freedom Movement’. Finally, the Swedish sample draws on secondary data and findings from research reports produced by the Swedish Defence Agency and investigative journalism from Expo.

In Canada, the online organizing and commentary around the Freedom Convoy protests primarily evolved around Reddit and Twitter. For Canada, we therefore collected data from the two largest Freedom Convoy subreddits: r/FreedomConvoy2022, a highly active online community of around 15 thousand members founded on 22 January which has targeted both Canadian and American sympathizers; and the now banned r/TruckersFreedomParty, founded a week after r/FreedomConvoy2022, reaching almost 300 members at its peak. Together the two subreddits provide us with a total of 450 online posts. Additionally, we drew insights from Twitter data collected, with a custom-built Twitter scraper using Twitter’s API, from 19 January to 9 March 2022, as the convoy made its way into Ottawa and other cities in Canada. Any tweet that used one of 12 convoy-related hashtags (such as #TruckersforFreedom, #BearHug, and #ConvoytoOttawa 2022) were collected, resulting in a dataset of 3.5 million tweets. Even if not cited explicitly, the Twitter data informed the trends we identify and discuss in the analysis of the reddit posts. As the two data sets include an extensive number of data points and hence are much too large to analyze qualitatively in any meaningful way, we first mined the data for content indicating overlaps between far-right conspiracies and discursive elements within the broader protest narratives using a systematic keyword search. For this process, we used a set of predefined keywords specific to each country-context that were first piloted and tested by the authors, then adjusted for accuracy and comparability and applied to extract relevant comments for further analysis.

This smaller sample was then subjected to a qualitative narrative analysis informed by the questions: How did far-right narratives merge with COVID-19 protests in Canada and Sweden? Around which actors, (visual) symbols and (conspiratorial) ideas did convergence occur? Using narrative inquiry when analyzing multimodal media ‘texts’ entails an iterative process of moving back and forth between data and theoretical concepts mining for key components at the heart of a narrative as defined above: These include first, formulaic definitions that flesh out the identities of in and out groups (Who is part of the ingroup? Who is part of the out-group?) and second identifying a crisis-solution construct that prescribes a certain set of actions based on those identity definitions (What is the core of the crisis /threat? What are the proposed solutions and what actions are required to achieve this?).

In the next analytical step, we then engaged in a comparative analysis focusing on similarities and differences in the narrative patterns and their articulation online across the two countries as well as their translocal and transnational dimensions. We coded for the three overlapping modes of transnationality offered in the framework of McSwiney et al. (2021). In other words, we ask: how does the visual protest material circulated by the two movements facilitate transnationality through the circulation of identical content, direct communicative references or cross-national similarities?

The study has been subjected to ethical vetting and approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

The convergence of far-right and COVID-19 protest narratives

Freedom Convoy, Canada

The Freedom Convoy emerged as a series of protests and blockades in Canada against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions beginning in early 2022. On 22 January 2022, hundreds of vehicles formed convoys from several points and traversed Canadian provinces aiming to converge in Ottawa. In the lead-up to their arrival in Ottawa, it was reported that far-right and white supremacist groups were hoping to capitalize on the protest to bring about violence on Parliament Hill, echoing the 2021 US Capitol attack. Even though many members of the convoy condemned the participation of extremist groups, leading organizers have been associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory, COVID-19 skepticism, and anti-vaxx sentiment, and with anti-LGBTQI+ and Islamophobic hate groups (Argentino & Amarasingam, 2020). In addition, once in Ottawa, some protesters were photographed freely waving Nazi flags at the rally as well as signs comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Threatening not to leave until COVID-19 restrictions and mandates were repealed, on February 14 Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, allowing the government to take steps to deal with what was considered a provincial emergency. These included arresting organizers and protesters, freezing their bank accounts, removing parked vehicles, and dismantling blockades. By 21 February 2022, most of the protesters had been cleared from Ottawa.

Online, the Freedom Convoy became an opportunity for protesters to push for extremist views, including antisemitism, with a view to spreading mistrust towards and disinformation about established institutions. The two largest Freedom Convoy subreddits emerging from the protests were r/FreedomConvoy2022, a highly active online community of around 15 thousand members founded on 22 January which has targeted both Canadian and American sympathizers; and the now banned r/TruckersFreedomParty, founded a week after r/FreedomConvoy2022, reaching almost 300 members at its peak. One of the main differences between the message spread in the offline sphere and the online sphere is the use of Nazi symbols. Offline, Nazi symbolism and antisemitic references were present but not dominant, while online anti-Nazi rhetoric was widespread. Previous research on online hate speech on Reddit has demonstrated that the use of anti-Nazi rhetoric by far-right proponents is not uncommon, allowing users sympathetic with extremist views to circumvent hate speech restrictions; share information about the nature of Nazi Germany; and generally expose users to extremist ideas. The most common theme appearing in equal or similar format in both the r/FreedomConvoy2022 and the r/TruckersFreedomParty groups was the comparison between COVID-19 mandates and Nazi Germany.

Such a comparison included equating Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Emergency Act to Adolf Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933; establishing parallels between Trudeau’s Canada and Nazi Germany (including comparing the Ottawa Police to the Geheime Staatspolizei); or describing the truckers as victims of a new Holocaust. Overall, the online Freedom Convoy subreddits were dominated by what scholars have termed ‘playing the Nazi card’. This rhetorical strategy is used to invalidate someone else’s position. The ‘careless Holocaust analogies’ promoted by the Freedom Convoy movement are not used to express sympathy or support for the victims of the systematic murder of peoples by Nazi Germany, but rather utilized as a ‘shorthand for good vs. evil’, to quickly and casually ‘demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets’ (Friedberg, 2018). Thus, a way to assess where ideology stands when someone ‘plays the Nazi card’ would be by looking at their targets, which in this case is the established government led by the Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. That the enemy is Canada’s Liberal Party became even clearer when the Freedom Convoy online groups transitioned into speaking of Trudeau as Castro Jr., Castro’s Son, or calling Trudeau ‘Communist dictator Justin Castreau’. Similarly, comparisons emerged between the truckers and the Tank Man’s resistance to communist Chinese suppression of the peaceful student protests in Beijing in 1989, or between Chinese communist dictator Mao Tse Tung and Trudeau (‘Trudao Tse Tung’), ending with parallels between Trudeau and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Conversations about the allegedly totalitarian ways of the Canadian government in addressing the pandemic rapidly turned into conspiratorial narratives on its secretive character: a government dominated by ‘global elites’ hidden from ‘the people’. The use of such populist rhetoric during the pandemic allowed for the widespread exposure to conspiracy theories (Stecula & Pickup, 2021). These predominantly blamed political elites for curtailing individual rights and freedoms by centralizing power. This form of ‘pandemic populism’ (Vieten, 2020) positioning ordinary people in opposition to an elitist and malign outgroup reflects the findings of large-scale studies such as that of Hughes et al. (2021) who demonstrate that the most frequent narrative spread by anti-vaccine and COVID-denialist media focused on the idea of corrupt elites representing a menace to the people. In the online sphere around the Freedom Convoy, the idea of the people is closely associated with ‘the truth’ challenging the lies presented in the media. Memes depict the press as connected to government control, money and lies. All of these elements tap into antisemitic tropes associated with the idea that a secret Jewish force controls government, business, media and public opinion, and is responsible for society’s woes. It is common for the far-right to use antisemitism in its triadic rhetoric (different from the left-wing populism dyadic rhetoric), which incorporates a third group to the antagonistic anti-elitist narrative. Here, ‘the pure people’ is construed in opposition to an abject Other not only defined in elitist and political terms, but also in ethnic terms.

The most evident intersections between COVID-19 protest narratives and far-right discourse in Canada were the permeation of Alt-Right rhetoric and imagery into the Freedom Convoy’s online feed, not least in regard to memes (Molas, 2021). This is also where conspiratorial discourse is most evident, including the incorporation of QAnon and the Great Reset conspiracy theories (Argentino & Amarasingam, 2020).² A rather crucial symbol signaling far-right influence in online conversations among supporters of the Freedom Convoy was Pepe the Frog. which is widely known to be a symbol of white supremacism and anti-state sentiment. In the online sphere around the Freedom Convoy, the Pepe version called ‘Honkler’ in particular was used to signal skepticism towards authorities and promote violence against national and transnational institutions.

As noted in the final report of the Public Order Emergency Commission, tasked with assessing the government’s declaration of the Emergencies Act, actors involved in the Freedom Convoy protests varied from individuals who experienced ‘genuine fatigue and hardship caused by almost two years of COVID-19 measures’ to radical actors such as ‘ethnonationalist extremists and conspiracy groups’ (POEC, 2022). In Coutts, Alberta, the RCMP learned of the possible presence of firearm caches at protests. On February 11, the RCMP obtained authorization to wiretap suspected individuals. Based on the results of the wiretap, the RCMP executed a search warrant on February 14, resulting in the seizure of ‘13 long guns, two handguns, two sets of body armor, a machete, a large quantity of ammunition, and high-capacity magazines’ (POEC, 2022). Conspiracies related to the arrests quickly surfaced with some protest organizers claiming that law enforcement had planted the weapons to make the protesters look bad. Among those arrested were supporters of the Diagolon movement, which supporters claim is a satire of the far-right, but research suggests is in fact a meme-driven far-right separatist movement in Canada (Smith & Kriner, 2022).

The freedom movement, Sweden

The Freedom Movement was the unifying organization formed in March 2021 that brought together the motley array of actors protesting the introduction of vaccination certificates and perceived encroachment on civil liberties due to public health restrictions in Sweden. As such the Freedom Movement is a specific organization, but the term has become synonymous with the broader series of public demonstrations ‘for freedom and truth’ that took place in major cities across the country during 2021 and the beginning of 2022. Interestingly, in terms of the transnational aspects of the movement, the first COVID-19 protests in Sweden were in fact initiated by an international actor, the World Freedom Alliance. The Swedish branch of this group was officially founded the day after the first street protests on Kungsträdholmen in Stockholm in 2021 when delegates from several European countries met and activists from the US participated via link (Vergara, 2022). The Freedom Movement started out as a popular and ideologically diverse movement and many of its original organizers came out of a New-Age spiritual context strongly influenced by ideas of a global conspiracy centered on Big Pharma and Big Tech. Gradually however, leading figures in the movement shifted towards far-right ideas, rhetoric, and platforms, just as white supremacist actors quickly became more prominent in the street protests and online activism (Fröjd et al., 2022; Leman, 2021; Sarnecki et al., 2023).

Overall, the Swedish far-right took an ambivalent stance on the pandemic and the measures taken to prevent its spread by the government. Because the Swedish authorities did not enforce any strict lockdown policy or mask mandates like elsewhere in the world, the pandemic offered less of a straightforward opportunity structure for far-right actors in the country. In general, far right organizations, groups and their appurtenant media outlets were reluctant or late in exploiting the pandemic and the vaccine issue compared to the rest of Europe. Key far-right actors in the country such as the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), Alternative for Sweden (AfS) and Det Fria Sverige (DFS), had no clear line until the vaccine passport issue grew in late 2021. While far-right actors initially supported the restrictions implemented by the state, this attitude changed over time and their official stance aligned more clearly with the libertarian and anti-State views of far-right movements elsewhere in the world, including Canada. The shift happened partly because of inspiration from right-wing extremist organizations in Europe and North America, and partly because the restrictions started having a negative impact on their own offline activities. Other actors on the far-right were quicker to respond to the opportunities afforded by the pandemic. ‘The Network’ (fronted by the organization Education for Future) for example joined in on the pandemic denial and anti-vaccine propaganda early on and saw recruitment potential in the instability and uncertainties caused by the pandemic (Sarnecki et al., 2023).

In 2021, leading actors in ‘the Network’ began working with the Freedom Movement - which had organized the largest protests against the covid restrictions in October of that year. Several people active in the Freedom Movement’s activist group ‘Freedom Defence Sweden’ were also active in the Network, and key actors spoke at activities organized by the Freedom Movement just as the Freedom Movement leaders spoke at the Network’s book fair that year. Leading voices in the Freedom Movement later started using the cluster of far-right media channels, making guest appearances or hosting YouTube channels.

In Sweden too, protesters ‘played the Nazi card’. Both online and in street protests, symbols which in various ways equated Covid-restrictions to life under South African apartheid or Nazi-Germany were used. Most prominently, calls were made for new Nuremberg trials and, like in the Canadian protests, the government and authorities were equated with the Nazis on a number of occasions. Calls for protests were propagated by, for example, Awake Sweden, one of the most prominent and long-standing hubs of conspiracy theories and antisemitism in the country:

We are witnessing the return of Nazism, but this time throughout the Western world. Austria, Germany and Italy have eliminated civil liberties more thoroughly than Hitler and Mussolini achieved. (Telegram post to The Freedom Movement paraphrasing vaken.se 2021)

Banners and posters in the street protests too had swastikas, the Star of David or involved slogans such as ‘Hitler too wanted enforcement’ and the online conversations were rife with ideas of Sweden turning into a ‘democraturship’ – a totalitarian rule enforcing ‘medical apartheid’ (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Swedish meme comparing Holocaust to current day vaccine mandates.

In such comparisons, citizens living under restrictions are equated with persecuted Jews and victims of the Holocaust. While this way of relativizing and trivializing the Holocaust was fairly widespread, such narratives took a more radical, anti-Semitic form among the far-right actors participating in the protests. In these narratives, far-right actors propagated conspiracy theories around the idea of a Zionist power with a hidden agenda, the pandemic restrictions and vaccines in order to establish control over populations worldwide. Members of the neo-Nazi organization NRM for example left various anti-Semitic comments in the official Telegram channels of the Freedom Movement:

democracy is a system where JEWISH power owns and rules and that JEWISH power and democracy must be crushed and replaced by National Socialism which means PEOPLE’S POWER!

But most commonly anti-Semitic remarks were more subtle, involving references to the Illuminati, Soros or Zionist world rule:

Naturel Law  … 

When will we reveal the truth about the Second World War?

And all the other wars since then  …  all!

The 13 families that rule humanity.

The children who disappear every year.

And all the other lies and the horrible things that burden us?!

The vaccine is only a fraction of what we should be bringing into the light of day.

In Sweden, calls for a new Nuremberg trial were promulgated primarily by World Freedom Alliance – an actor which has previously appeared in various neo-Nazi contexts in the country and became a central actor in the Freedom Movement. They rallied for the establishment of a ‘people’s tribunal’, where those in power would be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Natural and Common Law Tribunal for Public Health and Justice and People’s Court are additional examples of initiatives proposed by activists in a range of countries, including Sweden. Specific Swedish politicians, government officials, journalists and scientists were named and ‘summoned’ just as prominent international figures are included in the long list of actors to be held accountable:

Globalists, psychopaths obsessed with extreme control needs such as Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Sebastian Kurz, Jacinda Ardern, Ursula von der Leyen as coup makers and front figures for the fake pandemic! All these schizophrenic people, business leaders and others who publicly speak and propagate in the media for corona 19; politicians, officials, judges, journalists, doctors, medical staff and police officers who propagate or blackmail citizens to take the vaccine should be judicially tried and imprisoned for genocide and crimes against humanity! And after serving a prison sentence, be banned for life from employment in government institutions or the public sector! Where is today the Hague Tribunal, where is the ‘Nuremberg Code’ today?

These various calls for a peoples’ tribunal are part of a broader anti-establishment narrative, and of the proposed ‘solution’ to the conflict at the heart of the meta-narrative. The idea of betrayal figures prominently in the online ecosystem of the far-right in Sweden, where politicians and representatives of public authorities generally are presented as traitors to the people. These imagined tribunals at times subtly refer to the public execution campaigns conjured up around the so-called Finspång tribunals, which have been circulating in far-right circles, at least since the 2018 election. Finspång is a recurring trope in the ongoing online campaign, referring to a series of concrete death threats by far-right actors in Sweden communicated mainly through memes online, but also stickers in public spaces and other modes of propaganda (Askanius & Keller, 2021; Miller-Idriss, 2019). As such, the campaign recounts the story of a future tribunal to take place after fascist take-over in which ‘enemies of the people’ mainly politicians, journalists, researchers are to be held accountable for their ‘race betrayal’ against white swedes and hanged from lamp posts and cranes across the country (Askanius, 2021). During the pandemic, the Finspång memes were revisited and adapted to the new political realities and public figures involved in handling the pandemic. Besides extensive references to public tribunals, the data also includes more explicitly violent rhetoric, such as memes depicting state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell being executed in a public hanging. The intertextual references and obvious similarities in the vocabulary, esthetic and symbolism invoked in these posts and in previous far-right propaganda campaigns about a new Nuremberg trial to persecute ‘the Elite’ speak to the ways in which long standing doctrines and violent fantasies were repackaged and instrumentalized in the context of the COVID19 protests.

Further, COVID-19 protest narratives and far-right narratives intersected around the idea of The Great Reset and its related conspiracy theories in ways similar to the Canadian case (the plandemic,³ the New World Order, the rise of a One World Government orchestrated by the UN and outlined in their Agenda 2030 announced in June 2020, etc.): ‘there is no pandemic, only a war: the elite is trying to control us’ (Freedom Central 2021).

Some users go to great lengths to explain the details of this complicated plot, but most often limit themselves to providing a simple link or reading suggestions for people to ‘educate themselves’:

Our financial system is the problem. We’re heading for an economic collapse. Corona serves to distract and enslave people. Book recommendation ‘The Great Reset’ Klaus Schwab and ‘ False Alarm Corona’ Sucharit Bhakdi.

In these narratives, the Swedish state is frequently described as ‘a globalist regime’, a ‘shadow government’ or a ‘puppet regime’ seen to be ‘operating under a false flag’: ‘This is a coup d’état, our politicians are not working for us, they are working for a foreign power and are traitors’ (World Freedom Alliance 2021). A common undercurrent among proponents of the Great Reset theory is a general distrust of vaccines, which are believed to be forced upon people to fulfill the nefarious objectives of the government and Big Pharma. In Sweden, these conspiracy tap into and blend with a more general vaccine skepticism which has been simmering since the 2009 H1N1 pandemic (Swine Flu), which generated considerable debate about vaccine programs and public anxieties around the risks of vaccine-associated narcolepsy (see Kokkiakis & Hammarlin, 2023; Lundgren, 2015).

Further, the Great Reset conspiracy is intimately tied up with long-standing and familiar right-wing conspiracy tropes about a group of elites working to undermine national sovereignty and individual freedoms. In this version of the narrative, the World Economic Forum, the WHO, media, and governments around the world, are controlled by Jews who are using the pandemic to set up a ‘One World Government. Compared to the Canadian data, there are however not a lot of explicit references to Jews as the main culprits or perpetrators behind the pandemic. Although we do find examples of posts making explicit references (e.g. to specific wealthy Jewish families in Sweden such as the Wallenberg family), most often the ‘abstract Jew’ is invoked through tropes like ‘globalists’ or using a dog whistle such as ‘the Rothschilds’:

It’s the New World Order (in the shadow of the Korona 19 virus). The New World Order empire consists mainly of globalists, companies and institutions such as Bill Gates, Jorge Soros, Big Pharma and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as the Rothschild global banking system and not least the blood-sucking vampire Elizabeth II from England! They aspire to a global military and police dictatorship under their own absolute control. And thanks to unlimited financial resources with corrupt politicians, they have acquired disproportionate political power. What if the masses rise up!

The same can be said for QAnon conspiracies, which are also known to widely intersect with far-right campaigns (Amarasingam & Argentino, 2020). These too are only implicitly present in the Swedish data and mainly seen in content circulated by World Wide Rally for Freedom in Sweden, which has strong links to the QAnon movement in North America. For example, posts continuously make nods to ideas at the heart of QAnon conspiracies such as pedophilia or the kidnaping of children by speaking in vague terms of ‘protecting the children’ from ‘global satanists’ or LGBTQ+ persons (see Sarnecki et al., 2023). QAnon references were not seen on banners or in memes in the same way as in Canada. On Telegram, subtle or explicit references to ‘Q’ occur in the comments, but these are mainly in English and seem ‘inserted’ into the Swedish conversations by international users or reposted by a Swedish user.

The convergence of COVID-19 protest narratives with long standing anti-establishment ideas circulating on the far right points to the ability of far-right belief systems to tap into a general set of legitimate concerns about democratic rights during a public health emergency and the more mainstream sentiments of mistrust and weariness with the political system and its representatives. They tie into growing anti-establishment sentiments among the general Swedish public and prey on the general climate of political despondency and anxieties that ‘the people’ are being lied to by national governments and international institutions. Much like in the Canadian context, extremist narratives circulating in relation to the pandemic pitted ‘ordinary people’ – or pure populations – against a corrupt and malicious (financial, political, cultural) elite. Superseding the crisis/threat caused by the pandemic is thus a more general and existential crisis which is both unearthed and accelerated by Covid19. As such, the Swedish protests narratives, much like those in Canada, tapped into ideas of the country collapsing into totalitarianism and tyranny at the hands of corrupt and deceitful global elites. ‘Waking up’, ‘rising up’, ‘fighting back’ and ‘standing up’ to face the truth and resist the lies are invoked as nebulous yet omnipresent solutions. Some of these calls have accelerationist qualities in how proposed solutions (i.e. ‘insurgency’, ‘resistance’, ‘government take-downs’) may, if need be, turn to violence. In this narrative, systemic change and rebuilding society from scratch requires protesters to accelerate the collapse of society through acts of violence.

Translocal dimensions of the protest narratives: similarities and differences

The COVID-19 pandemic was, of course, first and foremost, a global health crisis. At the same time, however, it was also a test of people’s trust in democracy at the local level. In Canada and Sweden, anti-establishment protests challenged the legitimacy of the state and supranational institutions. Both movements rejected public health authorities and official sources around the pandemic, casting democratic governments as allies in a secretive global plan to use COVID-19 for their own gains to the detriment of ‘the people’. While the narratives differed on whether COVID-19 had been manufactured, whether it existed at all, or on whether its effects were grossly exaggerated, they all agreed on the intentions of the governments and other powerful institutions, like the media and academia: that they used COVID-19 to legitimize a power grab by the elites, which either sought to depopulate the earth, or install a totalitarian dictatorship.

In both cases, a focus on ‘the people’ as an in-group was central to defining the movements, which equally presented themselves as representing ‘truly democratic actors’ or ‘the only real alternative’ to successfully confront corrupted elites (Fernández-García & Luengo, 2019). As such, protesters positioned themselves as anti-establishment forces responsible for redefining the collective in ways that would bring back rights taken away from above. In other words, they constituted a popular reaction against ‘unresponsive political decision-makers’, who had caused citizens to feel ‘left behind and unheard’ (Droste, 2021, p. 297). Both the Freedom Convoy and the Freedom Movement used populist and anti-establishment rhetoric to demarcate and reify the in-groups, bringing to the fore narratives of privilege of certain groups over others within the nation.

Indeed, both the Freedom Convoy and the Freedom Movement adopted parallel vertical (people vs. elites) and horizontal (in-group vs. out-group) narratives that allowed them to address local concerns while being able to relate to international anxieties, build alliances and foster cross border solidarity among other anti-establishment movements. Thus, while permeated by undemocratic and exclusionary rhetoric, these movements were able to promote an idea of popular solidarity.

Antisemitism and antisemitic tropes fueled both movements, albeit most explicitly in the Canadian context. In both cases, and with the crucial help of old and new conspiracy theories, prejudice towards and myths around the Jewish community constituted a key discursive element in creating a sense of group belonging and explaining the loss of local or national sovereignty. Because narratives were underpinned held up by shared concerns and conversations about freedom and legitimacy, they allowed for transnational exchanges of symbols and imagery across countries. In both countries the Star of David, Nazi imagery, Holocaust denial and antisemitic cartoons figured in the visual protest material. The analysis suggests clear transnational parallels in the adoption of global conspiracy theories to explain anxieties experienced local. In similar ways, narratives spoke to a sense of deprivation, loss of control, and calls for protectionist policies against a shared inner and an outer enemy: a shadowy political elite against which hostile action or violence is needed. The parallel development of inner and outer adversaries caused the local and the international to overlap and depend on each other. This convergence shaped both narratives in the Freedom Convoy and the Freedom Movement.

Transnationality at work across the protest narratives

Several forms of transnationality are at work across the two data sets. The first and most explicit form of transnational flow, in which identical material is shared between protesters in the two countries, was also that least commonly identified in the data. We found only a few examples of transnationality understood as the circulation of the exact same visual protest artifacts across countries. There was evidence of transnationality through direct references to events and actors (i.e. Swedish protesters referring to events unfolding in Canada and vice versa) but overall, transnationality seem to work mainly at the level of a shared vocabulary and imagery (i.e. the protesters engage in a similar discourse and repertoire of symbols, tropes and slogans).

The ‘Freedom Convoy Sweden’ campaign launched in February 2021 in support of the Canadian truckers’ blockade of Ottawa is the most clear-cut example of the first category of transnationality evidencing a transnational flow of ideas in the data. In a mobilization videos⁴ created by actors in the Freedom movement in Sweden, protesters called for action and solidarity with the Freedom Convoy in Canada. On Telegram, the ‘World Wide Rally for Freedom Sweden’ channel contained multiple posts calling for copy-cat protests using template images and stock photos from the Canadian Freedom Convoy (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Telegram post calling for Swedish protesters to support the Freedom Convoy in Canada.

The video was accompanied by calls for action to build alliances with ‘truck drivers all over the world’ who are ‘waking up’ (TG post to Freedom Central 2021). These recurring calls indicate how the Canadian protests and occupation of Ottawa provided an opportunity structure for the Freedom movement to re-configure and refocus in a time when mobilizations were losing momentum in Sweden.

Despite the considerable efforts that seem to have gone into producing online content, including mobilization videos and music videos to accompany the siege of the capital, the streets of Stockholm never did fill up with trucks and there were no large-scale solidarity mobilizations around the country as envisioned by the organizers. ‘Convoy Sweden’ did however generate some traction online and the efforts that went into transnationalize the Canadian protests do tell us something important about the ways in which the narratives discursively connected actors in different national contexts through online media. To be sure, the narratives reflect a shared set of protest imaginaries and phantasmatic invocations of a Sweden-Canada sense of community, of being part of a global struggle against a common enemy.

Second, and more frequently, transnationality is evidenced by explicit direct communicative references appearing in both data sets. In the Swedish data, Canada-specific references often encourage protesters to look to the Canadian context for inspiration for mobilizing against the government:

We should act as has been done in Canada, i.e. mark and file with the Supreme Court, and we need a lawyer for this who is knowledgeable in this area?

Action4Canada and the Center for Constitutional Rights believe that the government is violating human rights and has exceeded its authority and is causing irreparable harm (…) and promoting dangerous experimental medical injections that they know, or should know, cause side effects and deaths. (TG post to The Freedom Movement 2021)

In Canada too, Sweden-as-nation also came up in anti-lockdown rhetoric as a lodestar to look to, and the Swedish ‘light touch strategy’ was seen as proving that protesters’ demands to avoid lockdowns and mask mandates had been right all along (e.g. posting links to ‘studies’ and news on far-right websites like GateWay Pundit ‘confirming that national lockdowns were neither “necessary” or “defensible”’).

Finally, and most prominently, transnationality manifested in how protesters in both countries, despite differences in the political contexts in which they operate, seemed to be participating simultaneously in a global discourse informed by a shared set of conspiracy narratives and pool of imageries. Protest narratives were strikingly similar in how they merged with far-right ideas and symbols, and in how they were shaped around a shared sense of aggrievement and facing a common global enemy. Slogans and imageries overlapped to a large degree as protesters posted global stock images and tapped into a shared set of visual protest materials. These include images of masks crossed out or depicted as oppressive symbols or various visuals of viruses, sometimes modified with messages critical of lockdowns, but also comparisons to the Holocaust (visual and written) and other references to historical events related to WW2 and Nazi occupation abound in online comments and banners and signs used in street protests.

Concluding discussion

COVID-19 fueled civil unrest globally, with countries such as Canada and Sweden experiencing social mobilization characterized by anti-establishment rhetoric and framed by the broad anti-COVID regulations umbrella. Protest movements in the two countries emerging under this umbrella shared common demands and grievances related to social restrictions, economic hardships and perceived government overreach. The shared language, symbols and images were malleable and easily adapted to local contexts, cultural factors, and the evolving nature of the pandemic response. These open-ended and flexible features provided amble opportunity for far-right actors to co-opt and influence protest narratives aiming to advance their political agenda. As such, the COVID-19 protests became intertwined with far-right narratives through a series of conspiracy theories and calls for radical solutions, and in some instances encouraging violence and directing threats against government officials, scientists, politicians, journalists, etc. The anti-lockdown and COVID-19 protests were not generally violent or orchestrated by far-right actors. Yet a close reading of material from across the ecosystem of online media in which the movements organized shows that the infiltration of far-right actors and anti-democratic ideas shaped the protest narratives in significant ways.

Essentially, what distinguishes extremist narratives circulating around the pandemic from the broader social protest discourse coming out of the peaceful ‘pandemic crowds’ (Gerbaudo, 2020) is how the us/them dichotomy of extremist narratives is construed around a proposition of hostility and/or violence against the ‘them’ (out-group), in ways that breach democratic principles, human rights, etc. and thus ultimately pose a threat to democracy. In both countries, the grievances promulgated by the far right during the pandemic, and merging with the broader Covid19-protests, were essentially repackaged versions of longstanding violent tropes and conspiracy theories. As such conspiracy narratives around the pandemic essentially reinvented the core tenets of deep state/governments betraying the people, perpetuating population control or even in some of the more pernicious strains of the Great Reset conspiracy, committing genocide on its own populations.

Albeit transnational, far-right responses to COVID-19 were far from uniform across the world. While some groups and individuals seized upon the opportunity to call for insurgency against governments restrictions, others remained ambivalent, with some accusing liberal governments of having become authoritarian regimes, and others supporting government mandates like lockdowns, mask wearing, vaccination and social distancing (ICCT, 2021; Molas & Bar-On, 2021). Much depended on where in the political arena far-right groups found themselves; what countries, nations, groups, or groups of nations they associated themselves with; what audiences they were trying to attract; and what groups they were trying to alienate or antagonize. Despite all of these contingencies, this study finds significant similarities in how far-right extremist narratives and anti-establishment ideas were constructed and appropriated in Canada and Sweden, but also that these were repurposed to make sense in different national contexts characterized by stark differences in the level of restrictions imposed and curtailment of civic rights. Unpacking the local/global intricacies of these narratives, and the extent to which they promoted transnational action and allegiances, helps us understand the ubiquity of contemporary anti-government and anti-establishment discourse propelled by the far-right but also its malleability and flexibility in terms of how it was made to fit different political contexts and scenarios across liberal democracies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Public Safety, Contract No. W7714-217852/001/SV, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap), grant 2019-13780, and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), [grant 2023-00611].

Notes on contributors

Tina Askanius

Tina Askanius is Professor in media and communication studies at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University and affiliated researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm.

Bàrbara Molas

Bàrbara Molas is a Research Fellow for the Current and Emerging Threats Programme at the International Center for Counter Terrorism in The Hague, Netherlands.

Amarnath Amarasingam

Amarnath Amarasingam is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 At the most basic level, conspiracy narratives constitute ‘an explanation of past, present or future events or circumstances that cites, as the primary cause, a conspiracy’ or a ‘small group of powerful individuals acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good’ (Uscinski, 2019). Such individuals, or organizations, are allegedly using their privileged positions (mainly in government or business) as a cover to hide the existence of a secret shadow world where the real power lies (Butter & Knight, 2020).

2 QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that originated in the United States in 2017. It began with an anonymous user, ‘Q’, posting on an internet forum, claiming to have insider access to government secrets. The central claim of QAnon is that a secret cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles controls the world and is being fought against by former President Donald Trump. The Great Reset is a conspiracy theory that alleges a secret global elite is using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to enact a radical restructuring of society, economy, and global governance to establish control over the masses. This theory is based on misinterpretations and distortions of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ initiative, which is a public call for a more sustainable and equitable global economy in the post-pandemic world.

3 This particular conspiracy theory stipulating that the COVID-19 virus was planned by global elites as a means of controlling the world’s population and profit from a potential vaccine has its origin in the movie with the same name that went viral on social media in the early month of the pandemic in May 2020.

4 The mobilisation video ‘Convoy Sweden 2022’ continues to be accessible on YouTube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it9kOu4Ms9s