Sweden drops ‘Islamophobia’ from official use — but the discrimination it describes is rising across Europe

STOCKHOLM (MNTV) — The Swedish government has announced it will no longer use the word “Islamophobia” in official communications, with Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard telling parliament the term is problematic because it centres on the idea of irrational individual fear rather than structural discrimination.

Stockholm will instead adopt the terms “anti-Muslim racism” or “anti-Muslim hatred” domestically, and plans to push for the same shift at the European Union and the United Nations. Discussions on the matter are expected to continue in Brussels during the third week of May.

The announcement followed a parliamentary question from Sweden Democrats MP Richard Jomshof, who argued that politicians and journalists had uncritically adopted a term he described as ideologically loaded, and that it was being used to silence liberal Muslims advocating for women’s rights and democratic reform.

Who’s celebrating — and why that matters

The decision was enthusiastically received by the Sweden Democrats, the right-wing populist party that provides parliamentary support for the governing coalition. MEP Charlie Weimers declared the government was finally disposing of what he called a fabricated concept that had been exploited to secure EU funding and advance an agenda.

Faw Azzat, an ambassador for GAPF, Sweden’s organisation against honour-related violence, also welcomed the change, describing the original term as a semantic device designed to conflate criticism of a religion with racism against people.

The celebratory tone of these responses is itself revealing. For many of those applauding the move, the issue is not which word best describes discrimination against Muslims — it is whether such discrimination should be treated as a serious structural concern at all. The fact that the decision has been most enthusiastically embraced by political actors with long records of hostility toward Muslim communities and immigration suggests the rebranding may function less as a linguistic refinement and more as a signal that the phenomenon it describes is being downgraded in political priority.

The evidence on the ground

Whatever terminology governments choose, the underlying reality documented by researchers and monitoring bodies across Europe is moving in one direction: the situation for Muslims is getting worse, not better.

The Coalition to Counter Islamophobia in Europe recorded 876 cases of anti-Muslim discrimination across the continent in 2025 alone. Eighty per cent of victims were women, and in 41 per cent of cases the discrimination was linked directly to wearing the hijab. France accounted for 85 per cent of recorded incidents, though the coalition noted that underreporting remained severe across nearly all countries.

In Sweden itself, a 2025 academic study found deeply rooted anti-Muslim prejudice embedded within the country’s institutional structures, with political and media narratives consistently framing Muslims as unwanted outsiders — findings that cast doubt on the country’s self-image as a model of inclusion and non-discrimination.

Germany, Spain, Austria, and Belgium have all documented similar patterns. The International Network Against Online Hate reported that migration and hostility toward Muslims are among the dominant themes in online hate content across Europe. The EU’s own Fundamental Rights Agency found in its most recent survey that 47 per cent of Muslims across 13 European countries said they had experienced racism in the past five years — up from 39 per cent in 2016.

A debate about language — or about legitimacy?

The argument over terminology is not new. Critics of the word “Islamophobia” have long contended that it conflates prejudice against people with criticism of a belief system, potentially shielding religious doctrines from legitimate scrutiny. Proponents counter that the term captures something the alternatives do not: the specific, irrational hostility directed at Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim that operates through fear, suspicion, and dehumanisation — and that functions in ways analogous to other recognised forms of prejudice.

The Swedish government’s preferred alternatives — “anti-Muslim racism” and “anti-Muslim hatred” — are not without their own complications. Some activists and scholars argue that “anti-Muslim racism” more accurately locates the problem in racialised systems of exclusion rather than individual attitudes. Others worry that without a widely recognised umbrella term, the phenomenon becomes easier to fragment, minimise, and ultimately ignore.

What is clear is that renaming a problem does not solve it. Sweden’s Muslim communities face discrimination in hiring, housing, education, and public life. Across Europe, mosques are vandalised, women in headscarves are harassed, and political parties build electoral platforms on the premise that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Western civilisation. Whether that reality is labelled Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, or anti-Muslim hatred, it remains the lived experience of millions of European citizens and residents.

The risk is that a debate about what to call the problem becomes a substitute for doing anything about it — and that governments invest more energy in policing vocabulary than in dismantling the structures of discrimination that the vocabulary, however imperfect, was coined to describe.