That is a very, very sad news, indeed. An assault on democracy at its best, as we know it. This is a second political assassination of a popular social democratic politician in Sweden (Olof Plame in1986) and more recently, as "sequel" to the killing of a right wing populist Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands.
This makes one wonder how susceptible open societies are to fascist violence. In the US, politicians are protected by several layers of heavy security, but in open societies (like Scandinavia or the Netherlands) they have very little, if any, security protection. Are these two (or three) assassinations merely the work of deranged individuals (and thus random events), or do they represent a trend? And if the latter, what kind of trend? I can see that the Swedish right wingers and fascists have not come near any halls of power for a long, long time - so political assassination is the only political act they are capable of carrying out. But Fortuyn was assassinated by a professed environmentalist - hardly your typical jackbooted thug of fascist reaction (albeit there are some fascist threads in the enviro movement).
Any thoughts?
Wojtek