Swedes Bare Scorn in Street Theater Mockery of Bush

They waved banners blasting the “Toxic Texan.” They carried out mock executions in a homemade electric chair, dumping “dead” bodies into a funeral van. They serenaded his hotel to refrains from the Beatles: “Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.” They marched through the streets of this scenic seaside city with mock movie posters portraying him as Darth Vader above a warning, “Say no to Son of Star Wars.”

And, in one of the more imaginative protests during the third stop of President Bush’s five-nation European tour, scores of youths carried out a mass mooning across from his hotel window. Assorted anti-Bush slogans were written across their collective exposed bottoms in large red letters.

Adrian Lowander, a 20-year-old philosophy student wearing a black Animal Liberation Front sweatshirt, said mooning had been chosen because it was nonviolent and the “most insulting” gesture.

Polite, mild-mannered Sweden has never seen anything quite like the range of protests that greeted Bush on Thursday.

As a sign of the scope of opposition in Europe to the Bush administration, even some of the Swedish police officers dispatched to control the demonstrations conceded that they don’t like his policies, either.

“I don’t like his death penalty. I don’t like what he did rejecting the Kyoto agreement on climate change. And while all nations need to be able to defend themselves, I don’t like the idea of putting arms in space,” said Ulf Hansen, a senior police officer, as he watched more than 10,000 demonstrators from across Europe march through town for an early-evening rally.

The Swedish government struggled to put a positive spin on the visit, the first by a sitting U.S. president. “Those who believe that we are going to meet a clownish, ill-informed person will be proved very wrong,” Prime Minister Goran Persson told the local media on the eve of Bush’s arrival. “President Bush is naturally competent and interested in what is happening. We are receiving a world politician who is very competent.”

And White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dismissed the demonstrators as a fact of life at international summits. “He knows they’re there, but it’s a very small presence,” he told reporters in Goteborg. “They’re hard to see.”

Bush has been unable to shed either the negative publicity or image of what Aftonbladet, a popular Swedish paper, called an “uneducated, fumbling politician with views dangerous for the world.”

Yet again, Bush didn’t help his case in Sweden. “We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease,” he said at a news conference about a continent that is made up of more than four dozen nations.

Since his first gaffe Monday transposing letters in the Spanish prime minister’s name, he has mispronounced the name of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s leader, twice mixed up the day of his first summit with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and garbled whether Europe should fear Russia or Russia should fear Europe.

“Europe ought not to fear--I mean Russia ought not to fear a Europe--Russia ought to welcome an expanded Europe on her border,” he told reporters in Goteborg.

Playing on the idea that Bush is his own worst publicist, demonstrators crafted a giant 9-foot bust of the president out of chicken wire and papier-mache and played a tape recording of his own words through a speaker.

“Why should we bother explaining his positions in our words when he says it all himself? Who can agree with his policies on the environment, the economy or foreign affairs? To us, they’re dangerous,” said 36-year-old Douglas Ohlson, an artist who spent two weeks making the bust, which towered over protesters as they marched it through Sweden’s second-largest city.

The demonstrations in Sweden didn’t compare to the anarchist violence that greeted Bush at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City two months ago. But there were bursts of trouble. Earlier Thursday, protesters destroyed two police cars and threw rocks and bottles at mounted police who surrounded a high school where protesters had been allowed to stay.

By the end of the evening’s anti-Bush rally, more than 200 people had been arrested. Most were taken when they defied police orders to disperse, although they were not involved in serious confrontations with officers.

But public sentiment in Goteborg has been just as deep as it was in Quebec--and Europe is a region that has far wider strategic, economic and diplomatic importance to the United States.

The skepticism was reflected by Tippa Hareide, an 86-year-old great-grandmother who traveled from her home in Oslo to join the protest. “We just don’t trust Bush,” she said. “We don’t believe he really wants peace, not with his ideas about missile defense. We in Europe are not just angry. We’re scared.”

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Times staff writer Carol J. Williams contributed to this report.