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Liberals Continue to Suffer

Building a Conservative Europe - October 14, 2025

Sweden is one of the few countries in Western Europe where an old traditional liberal party has chosen to cooperate with a party that belongs to the new nationalist and conservative right. For just over three years, four parties have governed Sweden together. Three of them have been in government and a fourth has been outside, but this fourth party has influenced the most of all four which policies the government would pursue.

If this right-wing alliance wins the parliamentary elections taking place in September next year, the party that has so far been outside, the Sweden Democrats, will demand to be included in the government. Party leader Jimmie Åkesson has been clear about this.

The previous distrust that many Swedes have had towards the party meant that the party leadership accepted a situation after the 2022 election where the party was placed outside the government but influenced the government’s policies with the help of a public agreement that regulated what would be implemented during the mandate period. Standing outside the government despite the party being part of the government’s majority base was the price the party paid for being able to participate in dictating government policy for the first time.

But now party leader Jimmie Åkesson has stated that if the right-wing bloc wins again, the party will have ministerial posts. They will not accept that the current situation is prolonged.

And this has caused real anxiety attacks in the smallest and least conservative party of the three that are part of the Swedish government. The Liberal Party has received dividends for its policies during the mandate period. They have been able to fill important ministerial posts for schools, higher education, the labor market and integration. But instead of advertising their political successes, the party has devoted itself to conducting a debate in front of an open curtain about whether the party should go so far as to offer the Sweden Democrats ministerial posts.

And now the new party leader, Simona Mohamsson, 31 years old and born from the Middle East although she herself was born in Germany, has made her decision. She has been forced to listen to the strong opinion in her party that threatened to leave the party organization if the party leadership accepted the Sweden Democrats in the government. Therefore, her message was that she would be happy to continue the collaboration with all the parties that are now part of the government’s base – she even emphasized that it has worked very well – but she will not accept that the Sweden Democrats receive ministerial posts.

The irritation that the announcement aroused among the other coalition parties was unmistakable. Anonymous representatives of the two other government parties went to the media and declared that the Liberals would be happy to leave the Riksdag at the next election. Right now, three years into the mandate, they are at 2.5 percent in opinion polls, and the parties need four percent to enter.

But what is interesting is still to see how painful it is for old liberal parties to accept the new nationalist right as a full-fledged coalition partner. And this even though they have no substantive political objections. It is not the politics that are wrong, but the ideological domicile.

Liberals seem to be living in the contradictions of the past, where Western liberalism was defined by its opposition to Western traditionalism. But today, it is not Westerners, Europeans who represent the most traditionalist and anti-progress values ​​in our Western societies, but rather the people who, in various ways, profess a sometimes-violent Islamism. And here, perhaps liberals need to understand that they can join hands with more conservative and nationalist forces in our European countries in order to stand up for what we can call our common liberal values.

Parts of the Liberals have understood this. But other parts are clinging to the old conflicts. For these, it is impossible in the long run to fully cooperate with a nationalist party.

Unfortunately, the result in Sweden risks being that the right is weakened and that the left can take back government power and thereby also slow down the conservative restoration that is so important in both Sweden and throughout Europe.