Swedish far-right leader bids to throttle criticism of wedding invite to biker gang boss

The leader of Sweden’s biggest far-right party was forced to explain why he invited to his wedding a motorcycle club boss with links to organized crime.
Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson married his wife last month in Sölvesborg, southern Sweden. Among the wedding guests was Robert Hedarv, leader of a branch of the Comanches motorcycle club, who Swedish authorities accused in 2015 of having links to organized crime.
Liberal Party leader Johan Pehrson called Hedarv’s attendance a “big failure” on the part of Åkesson. “You need to think about not encouraging people in the gang criminal environment in any way,” he said Tuesday in local media.
Åkesson denied knowing Hedarv “more than superficially,” said he had been invited as a plus one and claimed to be unaware of his links to criminal gangs, but admitted he had met him on several previous occasions in a lengthy statement on social media.
“If it turns out that a guest at my wedding does indeed have ties to gang crime, it is a most unfortunate and downright stupid, but honest mistake, which I sincerely regret,” he added.
Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch of the Christian Democrats party, who also attended the wedding, defended Åkesson on Tuesday, calling his explanation “reasonable.”
Hedarv, for his part, denied being involved in any criminal activity and said he barely knew Åkesson, who he said he had met “maybe three, four times.”
The Sweden Democrats are the second-largest party in Sweden and received about 20 percent of the vote in the 2022 national election after campaigning on a platform of stopping the spread of rampant gang violence, which has seen the country’s gun crime rate soar to be among the highest in the EU. The party supports a governing coalition of right-wing parties.