In the high-security wing of Ringerike prison, northwest of Oslo, Anders Behring Breivik occupies a two-storey complex with a fitness room, a television, a dishwasher, and a cage of three budgerigars. He has taken part in a gingerbread-house competition organised by the prison, and staff are available to play chess or floorball with him—activities in which, he noted in a 2016 court filing, he is ‘not at all interested’. Norwegian legal experts describe this indefinite isolation, without contact with other inmates, as the most severe sanction the state can impose short of physical punishment. The man who killed 77 people on 22 July 2011 now lives in a carefully regulated bubble, his every need met except the one he arguably craves most: an audience.

On that summer afternoon fifteen years ago, Breivik parked a white van loaded with 950 kilograms of explosives outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo. The bomb killed eight. He then drove to the island of Utøya, where the youth wing of the Labour Party was holding its summer camp, and spent over an hour methodically shooting teenagers and counsellors, killing 69. Dressed in a fake police uniform, he paused to call the police and offer to surrender, then continued firing. His 1,500-page manifesto, emailed to contacts across Europe just before the attack, called for the mass expulsion of Muslims from the continent—what he termed ‘remigration’—by the year 2083, using either financial incentives or force.

Viewed from Stockholm and Rome, the political resonance of that manifesto has shifted dramatically. Norwegian security officials now assess the threat from right-wing extremism as greater than in 2011, noting a rise in individuals who admire Breivik and find inspiration in online forums where extreme violence is blended with humour and gaming references. A PST counterterrorism officer described open platforms like TikTok as ‘almost a motorway for radicalisation’. In Sweden, a government dependent on the far-right Sweden Democrats has introduced policies on ‘vandel’ (conduct) and ‘återvandring’ (return migration) that political observers argue echo the terrorist’s own rhetoric. Italian analysts note that Breivik’s call for mass remigration, which in 2011 was widely condemned as extremist, now resembles proposals floated by mainstream politicians, including Donald Trump’s offer of cash and a plane ticket for voluntary departures. In Washington, the Trump administration’s 2026 counterterrorism strategy effectively removed violent right-wing extremism from its list of priorities, despite the 2021 Capitol attack and a series of mass shootings carried out by far-right perpetrators.

Norway’s response to Breivik himself embodies a different tension. The prison system is built on principles of rehabilitation and human dignity, even for the most reviled offender. Yet the result—a mass murderer baking gingerbread while complaining of inhuman treatment—provokes public unease. The real punishment, legal scholars argue, is the permanent social isolation, a sentence that can be extended indefinitely. In his cell, the budgerigars chirp, and the man who tried to ignite a race war remains sealed off from the society he sought to purify, while the political currents he once rode continue to reshape the continent’s mainstream.