Last month, yards from the Social Democrats’ booth in Rinkeby town square, where Kersten Aggefors is handing out leaflets for the party that has finished first in every Swedish election since 1917, masked young people set five cars ablaze.

A few days earlier, eight unidentified men had attacked the town’s half-built new police station, crashing through the gate and hurling rocks and firecrackers at security guards, apparently in retaliation for a drug bust. In January, two gunmen walked into a crowded pizzeria and shot a man dead, in what police said was a gang execution.

Rinkeby, a symbol of Scandinavian social democracy when it was built in the 1970s, had a bad reputation, but this was largely undeserved, said Aggefors, who has lived in the suburb, 20 minutes by metro from the capital, for 47 years.(theguardian)…[+]