A Moderate Radical From Iran Succeeds In Swedish Politics

Forbes

You might be forgiven for assuming that Hanif Bali is an international playboy or shipping magnate if you first encounter him as I do on a sunny afternoon in the town of Solna, just outside of Stockholm, which he represents in parliament. He approaches me with a broad smile, wearing salmon colored Bermuda shorts with an open collared polo shirt while sporting a closely cropped beard that completed a look suggesting a relaxed, but engaged, attitude.

The 26-year-old has been a member of parliament since 2010 for Sweden’s Moderate Party, which is part of the governing coalition. Before that, the precocious legislator was elected to the city council at the tender age of 19. His parents sent him to Sweden from Iran for safe keeping when he was just three years old. Politically active during Iran’s revolution, Hanif’s parents found that the dream of the Islamic state had turned into a nightmare.

“After 1980 everybody’s dreams and hopes of what they believed the revolution would be were shattered, kind of like what we’re seeing in Egypt right now. It didn’t become the democratic paradise everybody hoped,” he says as we drink beers at a tony restaurant in his district.

His mother, along with his uncle, who would later be executed, joined the opposition which simmered during the Iraq-Iran war. After his uncle was killed by the government when he was nine months old his parents fled to Iraq to a opposition camp. As the Gulf War began it was deemed too dangerous for full families to stay in the camp and Hanif was sent to Sweden and actually lived for a time in the Swedish headquarters of the People’s Mujahedin.

It is hard to imagine an American politician describing those political roots to an interviewer.

He describes his childhood as a series of moves from one Iranian family to another with spells in group homes before finding a stable family to live with in Stockholm’s northern suburbs, the same ones that erupted in riots earlier this year.

At this time he was one of the few immigrants in his elementary school in Husby. By the time he reached high school the population was more evenly split.

“I lived in both worlds all the time,” he says describing his childhood as he fiddled with a small canister of chewing tobacco. “I was searching for my identity asking ‘what am I?’ because I was never totally fitting in with the Swedish kids.” After a time he describes finding a middle ground in which he kept a foot in both worlds – Swedish and immigrant.

Like many adolescents Hanif struggled with locating the person he would become, a task made all the harder by absent parents. By age nine or ten he says he realized that he would never go back to Iran, despite the promises of his family, and decided to focus on where he was rather than where he might want to be.

“I identify myself as Swedish, not only in the legal sense that I’m a Swedish…. I used to be more strict about it, not even acknowledging that in some sense I’m Iranian.” After working so hard to create an identity with which he is comfortable Hanif feels he can be more inclusive. “I’m as Swedish as I can be so I can afford to be some Iranian too. So I identify as Swedish-Iranian. I am a Swede but I have a kind of spice,” he added with a slight smile.

The member of parliament walks around a construction site in his town.

Dr. Alireza Behtaui of Stockholm University’s Department of Social Anthropology has been exploring the journey of the children of immigrants in Sweden for several years. Himself an immigrant who came to Sweden in 1989 from Iran he says there is a hierarchy of the way Swedes see immigrants with Danes and other Scandinavians seen as brothers and dark skinned immigrants from places like Turkey and more recently Somalia seen as more separate.

“The segregation begins in the neighborhoods,” he says noting that once immigrants begin moving into an area white flight often follows. “Then when you attend school, which in many cases is in the neighborhood you are living in, there are not so many students with native born parents.” Bentaui’s research shows that one factor which causes the wage and achievement gaps between the children of immigrants and native born parents is the lack of diverse social and professional networks for second generation children. Because they often grow up in more segregated neighborhoods and schools they lack the large social networks that are essential to success in a small country like Sweden.

Hanif is perhaps an example of someone who has made his own networks and managed to thrive because of or in spite of the obstacles that he has faced. He joined the Moderate Party, which is a center-right party in Sweden, at a young age and the more he became involved the faster he rose up the ranks.

Today he has become something of a lightening rod as he stakes out his own positions rather than play the identity politics that he feels many on the left expect of an immigrant.

“Swedes are very open in what they identify as Swedish. If you speak the language, know the social codes you’re Swedish,” he says. He notes that the only time he’s felt treated differently because of his background as an immigrant is from anti-racists. “They say ‘how can you betray you’re people?’ ‘Who are my people?’ I’m a Moderate! In Sweden some people think that because you’re an immigrant you should have” certain points of view. While Swedish society tends towards extreme politeness the political sphere can be just as rough and tumble and anywhere.

“From the left they call me a ‘house nigger’ that I’m an animal that has been broken in some sense to do my master’s will. Which is very strange because nobody says that to the middle class guy who is is left [wing] or has his set of ideas. No one says to him ‘how can you have these ideas? You’re betraying your class!” he adds with a level of exasperation that seems to have its roots in countless heated discussions.

While he gives credit to the left for pushing the anti-racist agenda forcefully he refuses to be placed into a box by anyone on any side of the political spectrum.

“I don’t think people even reflect on it being racist that just because you have a certain background that it’s bad or wrong to have a set of ideas. I have the right to determine if I’m for or against a tax cut because of my intellect and not because of the color of my skin or where my parents were born.”

In Sweden some people think that because you're an immigrant you should have” certain points of view.

Hanif makes it clear that he believes Sweden is an open and tolerant society and indeed compared with its neighbors immigrants and their children have a lower wage gap and find more success here than they do in places like France or Denmark.

“Nobody finds the time to look in the mirror to say ‘what am I doing wrong?’” He says of those who focus more on structural reasons for the achievement and wage gaps that do exist. “That’s why Sweden has been such a successful country: because when there’s something wrong Sweden doesn’t point fingers to the U.S. or Russia and say ‘it’s their fault’. Swedes look inside and say ‘what did we do wrong and how can we fix this?’”

Dr. Behtaui notes that while Swedish society prides itself on being a nation with both a social and economic discourse centered around equality that immigrants have a subordinated place within society. Immigrants are included in the labor market but often in roles like janitorial services that ethnic Swedes would rather not do.

“Every single immigrant is not recruited to this type of job but even in jobs at university or if you are working as a physician with the same qualifications you have not the same position” as someone with a native Swedish background.

Hanif Bali and many other Swedes put little stock in the structural argument and as a young legislator with a long career ahead of him he serves not simply as a role model of political independence but as someone with his hands on the levers of power. Today more than seven percent of people born in Sweden have a at least one foreign parent and they will continue to push the nation to close the gap between its rhetoric and their reality.