We should have come out of the holiday season in Sweden jolly, rested and ready for a happy new year. But we didn’t. We should have finished the previous year with a sense of love and togetherness. But we didn’t. Everything bad has reached new levels and may well go even further.

We finished 2025, a year full of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, with the right-wing Sweden Democrats still dominating the political discourse, Greta Thunberg being maligned for her political activism, and the government cutting 10 billion kronor ($1.09bn) in development aid.

Just in time for the holidays, a Quran with bullet holes was hung on the Central Mosque’s fence in Stockholm, while an Iranian couple – both assistant nurses who had worked for a decade in Swedish hospitals – and their children were slated for deportation to Tehran.

In the new year, we are facing an election where the toxic political rhetoric about expelling criminals and others who do not “behave” and “adapt” will likely determine the outcome.

What comes next in Sweden deeply worries me.

As a Bosnian Swede, I want both my countries to be the best they can be. I want them to be great again, to use this charged phrase, because I do not think they are that great now. Yes, I look at both with some nostalgia because I remember what they were in different periods of my life.

I want Bosnia to be free from the nationalist poison and be a proper democratic state like Sweden. I want Sweden to regain its spirit of empathy that once upon a time made it accept thousands of us Bosnians during its worst economic crisis. Sweden did very well, and we Bosnians are said to be the best-integrated and most successful minority.

Today, we no longer have people like the Swedish priest who jumped on a plane and delivered aid at Sarajevo airport during the violent siege of........

© Al Jazeera