Summer dress, Marilyn-style blonde hair and scarlet lipstick: the deputy mayor of Stockholm transformed into a drag queen for a meeting with children as part of a campaign launched this week against “intolerance and populism”.
The member of the Liberal Party (centre-right), Jan Jönsson, 45, explained on Thursday to AFP that he had started this campaign after criticism made by the Sweden Democrats (extreme right) against the drag queens who read for the children in the libraries or guided tours of the Royal Drama Theater in Stockholm.
For freedom of expression
Animations of this type have been carried out in the country since 2017.
“I make myself a kind of canvas for drag performers (…) so that I can say that everyone should be free to express themselves,” he said.
“Some political parties try to restrict the freedoms of others and especially drag queens. With this stance, I hope others can say: ‘Okay, that’s enough. Sweden must be a free country,'” he added.
In a televised debate in early May, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, said it was “insane” that taxpayers’ money was spent on reading sessions for children by drag queens.
In particular, he attacked an artist known as “Shameless Whinehore” who called herself “Miss Shameless” during readings.
against populism
In a video clip on Twitter, Jan Jönsson appears in a chic style, beneath a puffy blonde wig, false eyelashes, a light blue flowered dress and stilettos.
In a chair, surrounded by children sitting on the floor, he reads a passage from “Les Frères Coeur-de-Lion”, a novel by the famous Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren, who invites you to stand up in your boots in the name of your ideas, even facing danger.
“The stories are not dangerous for children. Neither are drag queens. But populism and intolerance are dangerous for children and for adults, ”she says on camera.
Jan Jönsson has once been the face of a Liberal Party campaign against the scourge of gang crime in Sweden: the skinny leader in a flowery shirt and blue blazer dubbed “gangs’ enemy number one.”
Source: BFM TV
