Åsa N. Söderström

Tomorrow #Sweden votes. For the first time in my life I am voting for someone whose family came from the Middle East. Simona Mohamsson. Liberal party leader, minister for education and integration, and the first person of Arab origin to lead a Swedish party. Her father Mehsen is a Sunni Palestinian, born in Haifa, who spent part of his life in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Her mother Iman is a Lebanese Shia. The family changed its name from Mohammed to Mohamsson when they arrived in Sweden 2002. She grew up in Överlida, a village of 500 people south of Borås, and speaks four languages. I have spent years writing against Islamism. Some will find it strange that this is who I am backing. They have it backwards. Sweden's problem was never Muslims. It was that Swedish politics could never tell the difference between Muslims and Islamists, and so did neither any favours. The left built relationships with Brotherhood-linked organisations and called it inclusion. The right heard "Islamist" and thought "Muslim." Both were wrong, and the cost was real. For a period Sweden was among the largest per-capita exporters of Jihadis in the west. Naivety is not tolerance. It is abandonment. It abandons the people who left these movements behind in the first place. Which is why @SMohamsson matters. Her integration line is demand-heavy liberalism: language, school, work, values. Rights and responsibilities together, not welfare without expectation. Equality means being held to the same standard, not excused from it. And she is living proof it works. A refugee's daughter, dropped into a village of 500 people because her parents judged that was where the language and the country would stick, first in her family to finish university, now running the ministry that decides how the next generation does the same thing. This election also feels different in another way. Mosques with Iranian, Qatari and Salafi connections appear to be mobilising voters who normally stay home. If that holds, it would be the first Swedish election where Islamists, not Muslims, shape the outcome. The current government is mapping what political and violent Islamism actually does in Sweden. That work has made certain networks nervous, and nervous networks vote. So tomorrow I vote for the daughter of a Palestinian refugee who says Sweden should be a country for those who study, behave and care. Not because of where her family came from. Because she is the strongest argument in Swedish politics that where you come from decides nothing, and what you do decides everything. That is what Islamism cannot survive.