Cultural workers sound the alarm about political control

205 of DIK's members, which consist of, among other things, librarians and museum workers, have thus responded that they have been exposed to attempts to influence politicians.

It is a small percentage of the total of over 3,000 who responded to DIK's survey, but still too many according to Anna Troberg, chairman of DIK.

Approximately 150 people have elaborated what they mean in longer text responses.

- 205 is 205 times too much.

It can look very different, a municipal politician can come to the library and start arguing that there should not be rainbow flags or point to the multilingual shelf and say that there should only be books in Swedish, she says.

"Very noisy around drag story hour"

Sweden Democratic politicians are the ones most likely to get involved, according to those who answered that they were exposed to influence.

- We can definitely see that at the municipal level it is above all the Sweden Democrats who excelled.

Recently in Kalmar, there was a lot of fuss about the drag queen story hour where the politicians want to investigate how the libraries make purchases, which goes against the way Swedish cultural policy has been conducted, says Anna Troberg.

Over half of the respondents believe that general trust in an open democratic society is decreasing.

In the free text responses, there are members who testify about harassment against an LGBT exhibition and research on anti-Semitism that is questioned.

3428 people have responded to DIK's survey, which gives a response rate of 26 percent.

That is a fairly low response rate, is it possible to draw general conclusions from the responses?

- It's always a bit complicated, but the result is consistent with the picture received by members in recent years and in our work environment reports, says Anna Troberg.

Arm's length

The Sweden Democrats have previously been ambivalent about the principle of arm's length - that politicians should not get involved in how the tax-financed culture is designed.

Now the party says it stands behind the principle and it is also written into the Tidö agreement.

Last year, the Norwegian Agency for Cultural Analysis conducted a survey in which it was concluded that the government at the time did not allow the ideal of artistic freedom to be governing and that the contributors prized certain perspectives, such as gender equality, over others.

Kulturnyheterna has sought the Sweden Democrats and the Minister of Culture.