Let Kaplan talk about housing – Aftonbladet

Last Thursday evening appeared Sweden Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan (Green Party) in SVT’s News.

In nearly seven minutes, he was asked by TV host Anders Holmberg.

Kaplan was not there to talk about the government’s spring budget – which announces its intention to support the renovation of a million programs and increase the availability of housing for the elderly. Kaplan were also no questions about why this autumn

raises housing supplement for pensioners.

No, instead it was questions about a dinner last summer as housing minister was in the television studio to talk about.

was furious

on a photo of the dinner shows Mehmet Kaplan at the same table as Ilhan Sentürk, leader of the Swedish part of the Grey wolves – a right-wing and very violent group origin youth organization of the ultra-nationalist Turkish party MHP.

When newspapers started asking questions about all this, the minister’s press secretary furious and called it “low journalism”.

eventually, anyway Kaplan’s explanations and excuses. Grey Wolves he received, but it was the Turkish entrepreneurial society’s fault that they were there. A little later in the day he had to understand that he did not recognize Gray Wolves representative, never heard of him, never seen him. And despite the minister’s own words that he had long been in the Turkish Swedish civil society.

Not the first time

It is not the first time Mehmet Kaplan may appear in the media to talk about what he met. Kaplan hosted a conference in 2011 in the Swedish Parliament in which the anti-Semite Yvonne Ridley was one of the speakers. Three years earlier, he organized a meeting in parliament where some of the invited speakers belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood’s international network.

And yesterday could SVT tell that Kaplan 2013 met Milli Görüs – an organization with links to the Turkish ruling party AKP and described as “radically anti-European” of the German security police. Representatives of Milli Görüs was incidentally also the dinner in the summer.

Such here get a Swedish Housing Minister sit in a television studio and try to sort it out.

Doubled construction rate

There is a housing shortage in the country’s 250 municipalities. There is a doubling in five years. According to the National Board of Housing, 700 000 new apartments in the next ten years. To do that would be built in the Act need to be twice as high as today.

In the big cities runaway housing prices, people are paying extortionate rents for second- and third-hand contract. Overcrowding exists and companies can not recruit because people do not have anywhere to stay.

The government and opposition meet regularly for residential calls, but still has no sharp come out of the meetings.

Sweden needs a housing Minister devoted to homes.