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POLITICS

THE KEY PLAYERS: Who’s who in Swedish politics?

Sweden's political landscape was redrawn after the last election, and since then some key players have been replaced and allegiances shifted. Here's a look at who's who, and what they stand for.

THE KEY PLAYERS: Who's who in Swedish politics?
Social Democrat Party Leader Magdalena Andersson and Moderate Party Leader Ulf Kristersson. Photo: TT

THE GOVERNMENT: Moderates, Liberals and Christian Democrats, supported by the Sweden Democrats

Moderate Party (Moderaterna)

Vote share: 19.1 percent

Seats in parliament: 68

Leader: Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson

Party letter: M

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Photo: Christine Olsson/TT

Background: Ulf Kristersson took over as leader of the Moderates after Anna Kinberg Batra was ousted by the conservative party in September 2017, due to a dip in the polls after the party broke a Swedish taboo by softening the stance towards the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats.

Since then, opinion on collaborating with the Sweden Democrats has now shifted to the extent that Kristersson’s party are now leading a government with Sweden Democrat support.

The dad of three and former finance spokesperson of the Moderates in opposition was Minister of Social Security 2010-2014 in former leader Fredrik Reinfeldt’s popular centre-right coalition government, and has been prime minister since the 2022 election.

He is Sweden’s second most popular party leader with 29 percent of voters saying they had confidence in him in the most recent party leader opinion poll, from September 2023, behind former prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats Magdalena Andersson, on 52 percent.

Kristersson’s popularity has however dropped 4 percent since June, probably due to dissatisfaction over how his government has handled the Quran-burning crisis and the recent wave of gang violence.

Party: The Moderates’ traditional focus has been on law and order issues, job creation and cutting taxes.

Traditionally Sweden’s second-largest party behind the Social Democrats, the Moderates were pushed down to third place after the 2022 election by the Sweden Democrats, who took second place with 20.54 percent of the vote.

As recently as 2018, the Centre and Liberal parties refused to be part of a government that relied on passive support from the far-right Sweden Democrats, resulting in Kristersson’s attempt to form a government failing.

Now, the Centre Party still refuses to work with the Sweden Democrats, but with the Liberals and Christian Democrats on his side, Kristersson is leading a government supported by the Sweden Democrats with a three-seat majority – 176 of Sweden’s 349 parliamentary seats.

Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna)

Vote share: 5.34 percent

Seats in parliament: 19

Leader: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Energy, Business and Industry, Ebba Busch

Party letters: KD

Deputy Prime Minister and Energy, Business and Industry Minister Ebba Busch. Photo: Claudio Bresciani//TT

Background: A graduate in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University, Ebba Busch grew up in the nearby town of Gunsta and has been active in the Christian Democrats since 2006.

She was working as councillor in student city Uppsala when she was chosen to take over as party head from Göran Hägglund in April 2015. Busch has dual Norwegian citizenship through her father, and says she was inspired to enter politics following her mother’s bad experience with the Social Insurance Agency after going on sick leave for stress.

In a poll from September 2023, Busch came out as the least popular party leader among Swedes, with 63 percent of voters saying that they had little or no confidence in her.

Party: The Christian Democrats have tried to move away from their religious roots and build wider support, but the party has struggled to gain popularity. Its increasingly tough stance on immigration has also cost it some of its supporters who back traditionally Christian values.

Areas their policies focus on include welfare for the elderly and healthcare (specifically maternity healthcare).

The party only just reached the four-percent threshold needed to secure seats in the Swedish parliament in the 2014 election, but increased that to over 6 percent in 2018. In the last election, support dropped to 5.34 percent, but well above the 4 percent parliamentary threshold.

Political parties in Sweden must win at least 4 percent of the vote in order to enter parliament.

The Liberals (Liberalerna)

Vote share: 4.61 percent

Seats in parliament: 16

Leader: Employment and Integration Minister Johan Pehrson

Party letter: L

Employment and Integration Minister Johan Pehrson. Photo: Lars Schröder/TT

Background: Originally from Örebro, Pehrson was a Liberal MP between 1998 and 2015, and again from 2018 to present. He has a law degree from Uppsala University and took over leadership of the party from former leader Nyamko Sabuni in April 2022.

His leadership and election campaign has been characterised by tongue-in-cheek posters and adverts, including images of him wearing clothing popular in the 1980s, with taglines such as “The Liberals have been campaigning for Sweden to join Nato since this tie was modern”.

Party: The Liberals often refer to their party as kunskapspartiet or “the party of knowledge”, with education and schools a key issue. Other issues important for the Liberals are immigration and integration – where they aim to be open-but-tough – joining Nato, nuclear expansion, and the EU, where they recently launched a campaign for Sweden to join the Euro.

Their core supporters are middle-class voters.

Approval ratings fell below the Riksdag watermark in April 2015, only increasing when Pehrson took over in April 2022. In the three months between April and the September 2022 election, the Liberals jumped from 2.1 percent to 4.6 percent, just over the parliamentary threshold.

In 2019, the Liberal Party, along with the Centre Party, offered the Social Democrat-Green government passive support in exchange for policy influence in the so-called January Agreement of 2019.

In September 2022, The Liberals agreed to form a government with the Moderates and Christian Democrats, collaborating with the Sweden Democrats, a decision met with heavy scrutiny including from their own youth party.

The Liberals and the Sweden Democrats are the most ideologically opposed parties in the ruling blue bloc, and the government’s time in power so far has not been without clashes between the two.

Both the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, along with the opposition Green Party, were polling under 4 percent in November 2023.

Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna)

Vote share: 20.54 percent

Seats in parliament: 73

Leader: Jimmie Åkesson

Party letters: SD

Sweden Democrat Party Leader Jimmie Åkesson. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

Background: An early entrant into politics, Jimmie Åkesson began his career as a city councillor in his hometown, Sölvesborg, in southern Sweden, after joining the party’s youth wing as a teenager.

Åkesson is Sweden’s longest-serving current party leader, having led the party since May 2005. Under his leadership, the party has gone from strength to strength – entering parliament for the first time in 2010, and improving on its vote share each year since.

In just 12 years, Åkesson’s party has gone from being outside parliament to becoming the country’s second-largest party with over 20 percent of the vote.

Party: The nationalist Sweden Democrats were founded in 1988, evolving from far-right organisations with neo-Nazi roots. In recent years the party has worked to tone down its image as a racist and extremist group, although stories of party members making racist or Nazi comments do still occur with some degree of regularity.

Cutting immigration remains the party’s main goal and it is behind many of the new government’s proposed changes to migration policy.

The party has received increasing cooperation from the parties on the right since 2018, and in 2021, the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals have all opened the door to cooperation. In November 2021, the four opposition parties passed their budget – the first in Swedish history co-authored by the Sweden Democrats – forcing the former left-wing government to rule on a right-wing budget.

Since the election, the Sweden Democrats have used their status as the blue bloc’s largest party to achieve sizeable power despite not being in government, and the party co-authored the Tidö agreement – the coalition document setting out the government’s goals and policies for the next four years.

THE OPPOSITION: The Social Democrats, Left Party, Centre and Greens

Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna)

Vote share: 30.33 percent

Seats in parliament: 107

Leader: Magdalena Andersson

Party letter: S

Social Democrat party leader Magdalena Andersson. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

Background: Magdalena Andersson has been a member of the Social Democrats since 1983 when she joined the youth branch of the organisation as a 16-year-old, being elected chairperson of the Uppsala branch four years later.

She was Sweden’s finance minister from 2014 until 2021, when she took over from former party leader and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, becoming Sweden’s first female prime minister.

Just hours after her election, Andersson handed in her resignation after a tense budget vote threw the government into crisis.

Less than a week later, she was re-elected as Sweden’s prime minister, this time leading a single-party Social Democrat government rather than a Social Democrat-Green coalition.

The party were polling at 26 percent in October 2021, shortly before Andersson took over as leader. They achieved 30.33 percent of the vote in the 2022 election and their popularity has increased since: a November 2023 poll put them on 36.2 percent of the vote.

Party: The Social Democrats are the oldest and largest party in Sweden and dominated the political landscape until the 1990s. The party promotes workers’ rights and built the modern Swedish welfare state, paid for by progressive taxation.

After a crushing defeat in 2006, the Social Democrats continued to lose votes in 2010, particularly from Sweden’s urban middle class. The party bounced back after Löfven took over as leader and returned to power in a coalition with the Green Party following the general election in September 2014, but in 2018 the centre-left bloc reduced its lead to just one seat, leading the government to strike a deal with its former opposition, the Liberals and Centre parties.

Despite actually improving their share of the vote in the 2022 election, the other parties in the Social Democrats’ bloc lost support, so Andersson was unable to form a majority government.

This is the first time the Social Democrats have been in opposition since 2014 and only the third time since 1982.

The Left Party (Vänsterpartiet)

Vote share: 6.75 percent

Seats in parliament: 24

Leader: Nooshi Dadgostar

Party letter: V

Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar. Photo: Björn Larsson Rosvall/TT

Background: Nooshi Dadgostar took over the position of party leader in October 2020 after Jonas Sjöstedt, who had held the position since 2012. From Gothenburg, Dadgostar now lives in Stockholm. She became active in The Left Party’s youth party in 1999 and was elected a member of parliament in 2014. During her time as an MP, Dadgostar has worked on issues such as housing and higher pensions. She has previously also been the feminist spokesperson for The Left Party.

Since becoming the party’s leader, Dadgostar has proven herself to be a tough negotiator, toppling Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in a no-confidence vote just seven months after she was appointed, following a disagreement over proposals to change Sweden’s rental laws.

Löfven was re-elected, but not before the proposal in question was scrapped, giving the Left Party a jump in the polls.

She employed the same tactic in 2021, when Magdalena Andersson was on the cusp of becoming Sweden’s first female prime minister, with the Left Party refusing to back Andersson’s candidacy until she agreed to more generous pensions.

Her tactic paid off again – the Left Party backed Andersson, but only after it had secured the pension reform it wanted.

Party: As its name suggests, the Left Party is the most left-wing group in the Swedish parliament. It has a long history and described itself as communist until the 1990s. The party is against the privatisation of public companies and supports higher taxes to fund Sweden’s welfare state.

The Left Party has never served in government but usually offers support to Social Democrat governments whenever they are in power, although they also often criticise the centre-left on issues they don’t see eye to eye on.

In the 2022 election, they achieved 6.75 percent of the vote, a drop from the 8 percent they achieved in 2018.

The Green Party (Miljöpartiet de gröna)

Vote share: 5.08 percent

Seats in parliament: 18

Leaders (technically “spokespeople”): Märta Stenevi and Daniel Helldén

Party letters: MP

Green Party spokespeople Märta Stenevi and Daniel Helldén at the party’s congress. Photo: Christine Olsson/TT

Background: Märta Stenevi has a background in publishing, working in the industry for 15 years. She studied literature, film and publishing as well as business economics at Lund University.

After starting her political career in the Malmö region in 2014, she took on the role as party secretary in 2019. Stenevi replaced Isabella Lövin as one of the spokespeople of the Green Party in 2021 after the party congress. In 2021 she also became the Equality and Housing Minister, focused on counteracting segregation, a role she held until the Greens left government in November 2021.

Daniel Helldén, the former councillor in charge of transport in Stockholm, was elected as the party’s new leader at its congress in November 2023, taking over from Per Bolund.

Helldén has previously pushed for the Greens to focus primarily on the environment, whereas Stenevi belongs to the faction of the party that wants it to have a broad focus on all issues.

Party: The Greens first won seats in the Swedish parliament in 1988. The party is focused on fighting climate change and promotes policies designed to protect the planet for future generations.

They had hoped to become the third largest party in the September 2014 elections, but lost out to the nationalist Sweden Democrats. The Greens did, however, enter government for the first time in 2014, after forming a coalition with the Social Democrats, and stayed on in that coalition after the 2018 election, though their share of the vote fell from almost 7 percent to 4.4 – just barely over the four percent threshold for parliamentary representation.

Being part of the coalition didn’t necessarily help them gain support, particularly after the government made a deal with the centre-right Centre and Liberal parties in order to be able to govern in January 2019.

As well as clashing with the Social Democrats and the right bloc over environmental policies, from the expansion of Arlanda airport to the question of nuclear power, the other big question has been migration. While the Social Democrats opened up slightly to the right-wing, the Green Party is firmly against proposals like a cap on the number of asylum seekers who can enter Sweden each year.

Since the 2018 election, the Greens have seen even lower support in the polls.

After stepping down from their role in government due to the right-wing opposition’s budget passing just a few hours after Magdalena Andersson’s election in November 2021, the Greens saw a further drop in support, with many, including parliamentary speaker Andreas Norlén, criticising them for risking “damaging trust” in Sweden’s political system.

The Centre Party (Centerpartiet)

Vote share: 6.71 percent

Seats in parliament: 24

Leader: Muharrem Demirok

Party letter: C

Centre Party leader Muharrem Demirok. Photo: Jessica Gow/TT

Background: Demirok was born in 1976 in Stockholm and grew up in Vårby Gård in Huddinge, southeast Stockholm. He now lives in Linköping, a city in southern Sweden roughly halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, with his wife, his three children and his dog, Allan. He has a political science degree from Linköping University.

He was elected to the Swedish parliament in the 2022 election. Prior to this, he was deputy mayor of Linköping.

Demirok joined the Centre Party in 2002, and has stated that “an important reason for this was the Centre Party’s policy for rural areas and for the whole of Sweden”.

He describes himself as a lover of nature, especially forests, citing this as one reason behind his interest for the environment. He has also said that his Turkish family were farmers who taught him that “those who use the earth also respect it”.

He took over from former leader Annie Lööf, who had been leader of the party since 2011 and was almost synonymous with the Centre Party, in February 2023.

Party: The Centre Party has rural roots, emerging from Sweden’s Farmers’ League, which was set up more than one hundred years ago, and while agricultural and environmental issues remain key concerns alongside allowing local communities to make their own decisions, the party has tried to attract urban voters more recently by promising help for small businesses and criticising tough work permit rules for foreigners.

They won 8.6 percent in the 2018 election, their best result since 1998, but the centre-right bloc still failed to get enough votes to govern, partly due to Sweden Democrat gains. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, the Centre Party differentiated themselves from the other parties on the right, by refusing to co-operate with the Sweden Democrats.

This didn’t necessarily pay off for them – they dropped from 8.6 percent to 6.7 percent – and Lööf stepped down soon after the election. She said that her decision had been partly influenced by the threats and abusive posts online she faced since even before leaving the right-wing Alliance and giving her party’s support to the Social Democrats.

On July 6th 2022, she was the intended target of a planned terror attack at the Almedalen political festival. The perpetrator, Theodor Engström, who had a history in the extreme-right Nordic Resistance Movement, instead fatally stabbed a senior Swedish psychiatrist.

Member comments

  1. To the author of the article, would it be possible to specify which European party each party falls into?

  2. Look to the US to see what happens with unrestrained capitalism, homelessness, segregation, racial inequity. Eventually it leads to low wages, social unrest and violent hate groups. Next there will be screams for unrestrained gun ownership and you’ll have weapons of war like here in the US. We’ve had almost 400 mass shootings this year already. Yes, lack of affordable housing is a destructive weed that will grow wild. Who have you elected, Putin? Sounds like someone wants to destroy you. People who have nothing to lose act like they have nothing to lose. There should not be be massive profits in everything, and especially basic needs such as safe and affordable housing. Each year Scandinavia is rated as having the highest quality of life because there is a quality of life. Maslow hierarchy of needs outlines what a successful society needs to be strong and resilient, and basic need is housing. A word of warning from someone who cares, don’t create a massive social fissure that spawns far worse problems.

  3. Great article, concise but very informative. As someone who had no previous knowledge about Swedish politics, I feel I have the necessary bare minimum knowledge to appreciate it now.

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

With the think tank linked to the Sweden Democrats openly recruiting the next generation of far-right social media 'influencers', why is Sweden so complacent about moves to shift public opinion to the radical right, asks The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

The radical right in Sweden is at least open about what it’s trying to do.

The homepage of Oikos, the think tank set up by Mattias Karlsson, the former right-hand man of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, is currently recruiting the first 15 of “a new generation” of “conservative” online propagandists. 

The think tank – whose controlling foundation has been criticised for refusing to reveal the true origin of 5 million kronor in funding – this week launched its new Illustra Academy, which aims to train an army of young, far-right “creators” to help win over minds on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Successful applicants, it promises, will get the chance “to meet leading actors in social media and digital political influencing”.

They will get “mentorship from established political influencers”, build “valuable contacts with influencers, digital opinion-makers, creatives, politicians and possible future employers”, and meet “businesses, political organisations, communications agencies and media actors”. 

This programme is being set up by Andreas Palmlöv, one of the many top Sweden Democrats who went to the US after Donald Trump was elected president to work for an increasingly radicalised Republican Party, serving as an intern for the former Speaker of Congress Kevin McCarthy.

After his return to Sweden, Palmlöv was photographed meeting Gregg Keller, a US lobbyist he says he met through the Leadership Institute, an organisation backed by a who’s who of US billionaire donors which has over the past ten years spent 8 million kronor training up young “conservatives” in Europe.

Karlsson, Åkesson’s former right-hand man, has even closer links to the US, holding at least one meeting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and attending the wedding of the pro-Trump US conservative media profile Candace Owens in 2019.   

As a British citizen, I’m perhaps overly sensitive about the influence of conservative, libertarian donors and their think tanks, and of the efforts to use social media to push public opinion towards the radical right. 

Vote Leave, which led the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, started its life at 55 Tufton Street, the townhouse near the UK Parliament where the country’s most powerful “dark money” think tanks are based, while Matthew Elliot, its chief executive, was a Tufton Street veteran. 

Since the UK left the EU, the ruling Conservative Party has been increasingly captured by these think tanks and their wealthy backers.   

Ministers, former ministers and Conservative MPs now happily speak alongside radical right figures at lavish conferences like the National Conservatism UK conference part-funded by Christian pro-Trump US foundations, or the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference part-funded by Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the two billionaires who are the most open and prominent funders of attempts to shift the UK to the radical, libertarian right. 

Conservative MPs and former ministers have over the past two years been paid a total of £600,000 (8 million kronor) to appear on GB News, the Fox News clone jointly owned by Marshall and Chandler.

The Legatum Institute, Chandler’s own think tank, pretty much dictated the UK’s Brexit policy while Boris Johnson was prime minister, while during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, the Tufton Street think tanks supplied much of her team.

When her attempt to drive through their radical libertarian economic programme blew up spectacularly, she was forced to resign. But they haven’t given up, with Truss returning in February with the new Popular Conservatism group. 

I had always believed that the UK politics was immune to US levels of big donor influence, that the Conservative Party could never go the way of the Republican Party in the US, and it turns out I was wrong. 

So is that same naivety playing out in Sweden? 

The Oikos think tank has already started hosting international conservative conferences along the lines of ARC, with a conference at the Sundbyholms Slott castle outside Eskilstuna last year. 

When Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson raised questions earlier this year about the funding of Henrik Jönsson, a popular YouTube debater, she was sharply criticised by commentators of both left and right for seeking to smear a critic without providing evidence

But in the US, there are billionaire-funded ‘educational’ YouTube channels like PragerU that follow a very similar format to Jönsson’s. Jönsson’s videos reliably follow the same talking points, questioning whether global warming is really causing extreme weather, spread disinformation about wind farms, call for Sweden’s public broadcasters to be abolished, and claim migrants have trashed the economy. 

And when a donor last year asked Gunnar Strömmer, now Sweden’s Justice Minister, how to give 350,000 kronor to the Moderates without having to identify himself under party financing laws, in part of a sting by TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme, Strömmer advised him to give it directly to right-wing “opinion-makers”, meaning, presumably, people like Jönsson. 

Despite the uproar, Jönsson has never explicitly denied receiving funding from outside organisations, only that such funding does not influence his output. 

“I am quite open about the fact that I willingly take money from all decent organisations and private individuals,” he told the Dagens ETC newspaper, while declining to give any further details. “But no one controls what I say,” he added. 

He has admitted that the website for his Energiupproret campaign, which blamed green policy and the shutdown of nuclear power stations for high power prices in the run-up to the 2022 election, was built by Näringslivets Mediaservice, a right wing social media outfit the precise funding of which was always unclear, although it was linked to Stiftelsen Svenskt Näringsliv, a foundation set up partly by the Confederation of Swedish Industry. 

The founders of Oikos’ new influencer education programme would probably argue that nothing is stopping the political left and centre from raising funds to train up young social media influencers in exactly the same way. 

Left-wing parties are not above taking donations. Approached by the same donor as part of the Kalla Fakta undercover report, representatives of the centre-left Social Democrats – as well as the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats on the right – also recommended ways around party finance laws.

But do we really want the UK or Sweden to follow the path the US has taken in recent decades, where a handful of billionaires with radical right opinions have aggressively pumped money into think tanks and media outfits and so succeeded in pushing one of the main parties towards previously fringe political opinions? 

It didn’t need to be this way.

When Sweden was developing its new party financing laws back in 2016, experts warned the then government must not to allow the identity of donors to be hidden behind foundations, the key method used by so-called dark money in the US, but the loophole was left open by the law.

It’s not just Oikos, which is funded by an opaque foundation, Insamlingsstiftelsen för Svensk Konservatism (The Fundraising Foundation for Swedish Conservatism), which uses this loophole. 

When caught in the sting by the Kalla Fakta programme, a Social Democrat also suggested that the donor set up a foundation to hide their identity. 

It may be that money from US billionaires, big companies, or indeed from other states, is not yet being spent in Sweden in a way that can alter the political landscape, but because neither think tanks nor influencers need to give much information about who funds them, it’s impossible to know. 

In the UK, the danger may soon be averted. No one seems to take the new outfit fronted by Liz Truss too seriously, and the general election later this year should offer the chance to clean up the country’s politics.  

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve come very close to losing my original homeland to the kind of political developments seen in the US. I don’t want to lose my adopted country too.

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