Ebba Busch Apologizes for Misquoting Elina Pahnke

Culture Journalist: Ebba Busch Fabricated Quote

During the Christian Democrats' day at Almedalen this year, party leader Ebba Busch delivered a speech discussing her views on men and women.

"For decades, Swedish debate has treated men as a problem. This has led us astray," she said, citing well-known feminists whom she believes have contributed to a society that, according to Busch, wants to "clarify its issues with men."

She continued:

"One of Sweden's leading feminists said 'men are animals' and later tried to excuse herself by saying she should have said 'men are worse than animals.' Or culture writer Elina Pahnke when she exclaimed: 'Men's power is not an abstraction – it is concrete, and it crushes lives.' What have these powerful voices contributed to?"

However, Elina Pahnke did not recognize the words.

"Not a dumb quote. But I can't recall ever saying or writing it," she wrote in a culture article in Aftonbladet.

"No Source Found"

Together with author Agri Ismaïl, Pahnke tried to find the quote, without success, and also asked the Christian Democrats' press office for the source of the quote, she further wrote.

They also did not know where it was taken from.

"I have now taken a thorough round with some colleagues and the short answer is that I have not found any source. By all accounts, it is not a quote that can be found online. There may be various reasons for this," the press office replied in an email to Pahnke.

Similar to a Colleague's Headline

However, Pahnke found a similar quote in a headline from a five-year-old text in Aftonbladet, written by Tone Schunnesson: "Misogyny is not an abstraction – it kills women."

The whole situation is remarkable, Pahnke told Expressen.

"On a principled level, it is quite serious that a party leader, who is also Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister, singles out individual journalists, accuses them of being powerful, and also fabricates what they say. If you think this is a political strategy they are coming up with now, it feels quite worrying."

She wonders if Ebba Busch might have used AI for help.

"She probably used some program, cut and pasted probably. They themselves do not seem to have a good grasp of their sources, so I don't know if we will ever get the answer to what happened."

Later, it turns out that it is indeed AI that is behind the misquote. Ebba Busch herself wrote this in a Facebook post.

The quote obtained from an AI search turned out to be a "paraphrasing of what has been said in other contexts" and the sources that the AI tool provided were likely "fabricated."

Now, the KD leader apologizes to Elina Pahnke.

"The source of that quote turned out to be false. That I attributed to her something she did not say verbatim is extremely unfortunate, and I want to, of course, apologize to both her and everyone who listened," she writes.

Now Busch's team will rethink their approach.

"This is a completely new situation for us where we get a direct source that turns out to be incorrect. We take this seriously, and it means we will work differently going forward," writes Busch.