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As the Swedish election draws closer, the country’s unprecedented conservative turn since 2022 has caught attention worldwide. The Swedish government has been enacting some of Europe’s strictest immigration policies and even taken the first political steps for remigration. In the long term, it is possible that the Swedish decisions made in the past four years will form a blueprint for other European countries that wish to rebuild their country after decades of liberal and socialist migration policies.
Inside Sweden, the nationalist party the Sweden Democrats are considered by most voters and many analysts to be at the helm of this development, even if they are only supporting the government, the so-called Tidö coalition, with supply and confidence. Outside Sweden and in foreign media, it is naturally the Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party, who is the figurehead for Sweden’s change of course.
Perhaps unbeknownst to observers outside of the country, Kristersson is however in a deep leadership crisis. It is unlikely that he will remain party leader if his coalition cannot snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the coming months.
Is this a personal problem, or indicative of a deeper crisis in the Swedish political ‘bourgeoisie’?
The problem of centrist obsolescence
From the outset, one must understand that it is not due to the popularity of the Moderates and their governing partners the Christian Democrats and the Liberals that Sweden elected a right-wing government in 2022. All three of these parties suffered setbacks in 2022 compared to the previous election result in 2018 – together, the centre-right coalition gathers merely 29 percent of the current Swedish riksdag mandate. The only party that currently influences Swedish policy is the Sweden Democrats, which made enough of a stride to carry their weak companions across the finish line, overtaking the Moderates as the second largest party in the country, with 20 percent of the electorate.
Polling puts the Moderates and their junior partners even lower, especially with the Liberals consistently performing well below the parliamentary threshold of four percent of the vote. The Moderates are recorded to be as low as 16 points in some polls, and while the Christian Democrats have had wind in their sails during 2026 and are regularly balancing around six points, an election with the current polling situation would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the traditional Swedish centre-right.
To put things in perspective, the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, and their then-partner the Centre Party – which has since definitely situated itself on the left aisle of Swedish politics – was the challenger to Social Democratic hegemony in the 2000s. In 2006, the Alliance, as it was formally called, formed the first stable government right of the political centre in Sweden for the first time in 80 years. Brief and turbulent periods of non-Social Democratic governance between 1976 and 1982, and then again between 1991 and 1994, did not really put a dent in the solidly leftist Swedish society like the Alliance parties, under Moderate Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, did between 2006 and 2014.
Since then, and unmistakenly largely due to the serious Reinfeldtian mistakes on immigration, the Sweden Democrats have taken over the right-wing teeth in Swedish politics. The old ‘bourgeois’ parties are according to many old veterans – and evidently most of the voters too – husks of their former selves, incapable of originality and initiative.
Much of this is derived from typical media fright displayed by mainstream parties across the West. The careful attitude to change that the bourgeois parties host has left them paralysed on many sensitive topics. These parties abhor actively talking about immigration, but are afraid to step on anybody’s toes on the cultural battlefield that is also taking place across the West right now. An apt comparison would be the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, which tore itself apart by tossing out all orthodoxy and losing almost its entire voting base.
Frankly put, the government in Stockholm that much of conservative Europe is currently looking up to as a guiding star, paradoxically consists of the “usual suspects” – the politically correct and opportunistic purveyors of the liberal order that the nationalist wave was created in resistance to. It is only the Sweden Democratic active negotiation with and support of this government that gives it the trappings of the in-vogue national-conservative rule that occasionally fascinates observers in Europe.
So is this the fault of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderates?
Is Kristersson the wrong leader for his time?
Kristersson himself is, from a firmly conservative perspective, not a person who inspires awe and high expectations. He was a former minister during the now much-reviled Reinfeldt years, and a somewhat disgraced one at that, being implicated in a series of scandals concerning supposed kickbacks of real estate. While his now nearly two decade old scandals may largely have ceased to haunt him, he has for much of 2025 and 2026 been under criticism for his unqualified picks for key positions adjacent to his office after several security and intelligence scandals, as well as his side business with his wife, which some have speculated may have covertly affected some political decisions.
Kristersson’s starting position was weak, assuming Moderate leadership in 2017 after Fredrik Reinfeldt’s ill-destined successor, Anna Kinberg-Batra, resigned under humiliating circumstances. Kinberg-Batra’s problems with connecting with ordinary people and what some have described as Stockholm-centric arrogance raised fears that the Moderates were about to permanently lose their unprecedented gains from the height of the Reinfeldt years. The party collapsed from in some polls occasionally contending with the Social Democrats for the position as the biggest party in Sweden (a truly historical albeit oft-forgotten feat that today feels like an entirely different era), to a mere 15 percent of the votes on its worst days.
In the long term, Ulf Kristersson has done very little to permanently reverse this trend. Instead, he seems to be presiding over a still ongoing, managed decline of the Moderate Party.
As implied previously, the Moderates under Ulf Kristersson are in their (admittedly on paper likely strategically sound) plan to signal distance from the Sweden Democrats afraid to get on board with the conservative wave that is sweeping the West. The party at large still actively supports the profoundly leftist-connotated institutions of Sweden, such as the plethora of tax-funded left-leaning interest groups masquerading as civil society that hold a firm grip on public life in Sweden. From the politicisation of education on all levels, to the promotion of sexual identity politics (including to children), and even the state’s financial support of radical left-wing organisations, there is not a single hot-button issue that nationalists and conservatives are vocal about, that the Moderates have started to question.
Culturally, this is a party that is not at all reading the room – or arguably it is, and it just prefers the safety of leftist-informed political correctness over comparisons to the Sweden Democrats. It is uncertain which of these is more infuriating, to a conservative observer.
It can also be argued that while these oft-aired grievances with Moderate culture are recognised by most of the party’s leadership, it is a lose-lose situation. Damned if you do adopt conservative stances on divisive issues, damned if you don’t. A party that is having its support eroded before its very eyes with each passing year is perhaps not in the best position to experiment.
On the other hand, this may be exactly the right time to venture out of the comfort zone. The Moderates’ most desperate coalition partner, the Liberals, are throwing out comparatively radical ideas left and right in its bid to save itself from being voted out in September. Some of these ideas, such as mandating that school buildings must follow traditional authoritarian architecture, are from a conservative standpoint genuinely impressive.
The difference is perhaps that the Liberals is a party that is a heavily blood-let party. The entire internal opposition to the current party leader, the curiously pragmatic Simona Mohamsson, essentially deserted when she dragged her deeply divided party into a number of highly-publicised, high-stake agreements with the Sweden Democrats.
The Moderates do not lack profiles that evidently have their finger on the pulse of the conservative wave, in a way that would facilitate a true renewal in their aimless party – the resistance may in fact come from the leadership itself.
It has for example been observed by many that Ulf Kristersson has a strong personal conviction for LGBT questions and its lifestyles, to the degree that it puts him at odds with the current conservative values that are growing among Western youths. This is in and of itself probably not a major practical hurdle for the Moderates to overall get in tune with the times, but it is indicative of Kristersson’s person; he is of the 2000s school of liberalism, not part of the “new wave” of highly conscious conservative orthodoxy.
In the deeper political debate, these “culture war” topics are merely the superficials of it all, however. There are ideological barriers that have locked the Moderates into a harmful lane of political thought that has very tangible and more direct material consequences for Swedes that may play an underexplored part of the Moderates’ Sisyphean struggle.
The fossilised Moderate view of Sweden
The Moderates distinguish themselves through historical circumstances as the ideological antithesis of the Social Democrats. While the latter, the leading left-wing party that has dominated Swedish politics and public life for decades, is typically considered corporatist, collectivist, and stressing solidarity, the Moderates have over the course of the 20th century fallen into a dialectic relationship with them that is instead highly pluralistic, individualist, and stresses personal ambition. These are broad categorical descriptions of these parties that have remained more or less true across the decades, even though the cultural and political winds have shifted significantly back and forth.
These same winds have corrupted these ideological tenets beyond their original intent. The Moderates’ classic optimistic belief in the individual’s capabilities to develop has stagnated into a near-fetishisation of hard work. Even though we live in a time where there are growing difficulties experienced by many to find a job – let alone a stable job with a clear career path – and a decent home that supports the expectations of a first-world life, the Moderates are clinging onto a device that may have ringed true 40 years ago but no longer does. That ambition and hard work “always pays”. The antipathy towards the 21st-century labour market and economic structure is particularly strong among youths, which is alarming for any party or organisation that wishes to shape the future.
The obsession with hard work and self-sacrifice for an increasingly dwindling promise of a better future is not a good answer to the recent socialist waves that have become increasingly vocal in the West lately either. In New York City, Sohran Mamdani rose up as the foremost example of the victories of the progressive and socialist wing of the American left, when he won a staggering mayoral election victory on a platform of radical redistribution and intervention that seeks to address economic injustices in the city. Similarly, many European left-wing parties have found renewed purpose in classic socialist theses that most of the public thought were dead and buried with the end of the Cold War.
Also in Sweden it is apparent that the social planning and redistributive promises of the Social Democrats and the Left Party have paid off better for these parties than the Moderates’ insistence on rewarding work, entrepreneurialism and climbing the class ladder has paid off for the right.
But beyond the rhetoric, what is behind the Moderates’ vision to enable the successful individualist in every Swede?
Stale Moderate middle class favouritism does not attract youth
It is loath as a conservative to describe the complexities between different population groups based on economic situations as merely ‘class’, but it is potentially the most direct way of addressing why established centre-right parties like the Moderates are failing in today’s political landscape. While they purport to see the individual and are in opposition to the socialistic class analysis, they have nonetheless taken the form of a highly class-conscious party, by being wedged between the socialists on the left and the nationalists on the right, who are typically distinctly blue-collar, often rural, and in various ways economically disadvantaged compared to the favoured property owners of the Moderates. This ‘class’ difference between the “decent” right and the “vulgar” right is embodied in the strategic distancing from the Sweden Democrats, for example.
There are different variables at play by which the Moderates identify “their” class, and it is not mainly income, but also age, and specific housing situation.
The Moderate recipe to improving the lives of Swedes may adversarially be described as keeping the house-owning cohorts of Sweden artificially afloat. The most pertinent feature of this political favouritism is that it is, as critics have noticed, an overwhelmingly pro-’boomer’ economic policy, that may contribute to inhibiting the success of the younger generations.
Many of the government’s easings to limit the effect of the recession caused by the energy crisis and global instability have been targeting property owners, such as through benefits for excessive electricity bill hikes. Despite being presented by the government as a relief to all the households at large, the benefits are unproportionally reaped by house owners, who suffer the highest energy expenses. Other types of residences, especially rental apartments, have not qualified, leading to the energy relief being derided by the opposition as a backwards redistribution of societal wealth from the poor to the rich. Or, as they are called in Sweden, the “villa-owners”, which constitutes a very specific segment of the middle class.
The electricity relief is only one part of the government’s recession prevention, admittedly. The near-abolition of the fuel tax is one of the actions by the government that has improved the household economy more fairly. Regardless, the criticism of these ambitious easings is made all the more pertinent by their lack of backing in state finances; the government is, as outside observers might assume of a right-wing government, not exactly practising a rigid fiscal austerity, but maintaining the life lines they have tossed out to the Swedish people with loaned money. In essence, if one was to be very critical, the Moderates, who are undeniably in control here, are indebting Sweden to prop up an untenable energy and housing market.
In the background of these pro-property owner measures, there are the much-debated tax deductions for home renovations and home services, that were introduced by Reinfeldt’s government in 2007. The “ROT” deduction was intended to incentivise house-owners to invest in their property and in turn stimulating the private craftsman industry. The “RUT” deduction was applicable for contracted household services in or near the home, such as laundry, cleaning, or babysitting, also intended to stimulate the labour market.
Needless to say, those who benefit the most from these measures are house owners, who get write-offs while still managing to raise their property value. The criticism from the left has focused on this inequality aspect, while a more complicated side-effect of the gold rush in property improvement has contributed to skyrocketing house prices. Houses are almost entirely unaffordable for young people entering the job market, at least if they are located in attractive and highly developed urban regions, and that the government is rewarding house owners with tax write-offs for pulling up the ladder even further is perceived as an affront by many.
That the Moderates in the not so distant past promoted mass immigration also makes them culpable for the effects that this had on the housing market. One common trope when deriding the ‘bourgeois’ flip-flopping on immigration is that the average Moderate has been unconcerned with and even outwardly supported the uncontrolled immigration, as long as it didn’t affect them negatively. After all, it made their assets rise in value as thoroughly safe neighbourhoods became increasingly scarce in Swedish cities.
The ROT and RUT have been debated in various waves since their introduction, but they nonetheless survived the left-wing government between 2014 and 2022. Indeed, the Social Democrats too recognise that it is a bad idea to needlessly provoke this group.
But no party has been so committed to sustaining and improving the conditions of the house owners of Sweden as the Moderates. The above explanation illustrates the perspective that the party has, that house ownership and high degree of self-reliance, perhaps working in an executive position in a firm (bonus points if self-employed), is automatically morally superior to wage employment and living in a rented apartment. A simplified description yes, but a common perception of the Moderates nonetheless. It is not hard to understand the left-wing criticism that these priorities endure, since considering Sweden’s high taxation rate, it is paramount to a redistribution from the working class to the “villa class”.
That recently celebrated income tax reductions have proportionally benefitted the same upper middle class has further reinforced this image of the Moderates as a party propping up the wealthy and maintaining a property ladder with far between the steps. For the Moderates, this is perhaps a “tough but fair” stringency, but for many outside observers, it is an effort to keep the Swedish middle class boomers satisfied at the expense of everybody else.
Again, considering that the tax easings during the 2022–2026 term have been financed through loans, it is not hard as a conservative to nod in agreement. The not entirely insignificant number of principled conservatives that constitute the Moderate party need to recognise the merits of this argument. They cannot build themselves as a movement for Swedes of every class if they continue to seemingly only privilege those situationally lucky to have been able to use the “record years” (the Swedish term for the mid-20th century economic boom) as a springboard, and then leave crumbs to everybody else.
Meeting the same fate as the Tories?
We’ve seen the same conflict between ideals theorised some time in the 1970s and the needs of the 21st century play out in the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. This party has a lot in common with the Moderates, though granular differences between their approaches obviously exist. Both parties have become highly characterised by upper middle class interests, and the nimbleness that exists there on cultural issues.
The most prominent such cultural issue is perhaps immigration.
It was unfortunately considered the middle road in the 2000s to gradually accept the decline of the nation-state and the dismantling of borders. The Moderates became a fully open borders party in 2010, whereas for the Tories in Britain it happened in 2019. The Moderates scaled back their emphasis on this position in 2015, whereas for the Tories it happened in 2024. Shaped by their unrelenting ideological basis in the post-Cold War liberalism though, both parties retain their support for multiculturalism, though with a slowly growing number of caveats. Subsequently, due to their serious mistakes and flip-flopping, few besides their favourite propped up economic demographic are interested in these parties anymore.
Courting this one very particular group has turned the hour glass against the Moderates. The baby boomers who grew up in the 1970s and entered the labour and housing market in the ‘roaring 80s’ do not have infinite time left. The free-spirited former Moderate profile Hanif Bali has described his old party’s circling around the drain as a result of not understanding that the group that is still most likely to vote for a pluralistic and highly individualistic party are wealthy native Swedes. But as the Moderates have done little to nothing to facilitate the growth of the Swedish middle class, they have dug their own grave. With the 20th-century middle class dwindling, the role for the Moderates to fill in Swedish politics is increasingly obsolete, he warns.
How to salvage the Moderates?
The Moderates was originally the coalition against progressivism as it appeared in the late 19th century. As is typical in a now culturally progressive and liberal society like Sweden, many are holding the party’s history against it, with its critical stances on liberal core tenets such as universal suffrage frequently being brought up by the left. Nonetheless, the Moderates is as such one of the oldest still existing right-wing parties of European politics (even if it is outmatched in age by several of its sister parties in other countries). It would thus be an immense tragedy if the party succumbs to its inflexibility, by virtue of its age and near-constant presence in Swedish politics throughout the 20th century.
Emphasis on “near-constant” – the key to the Moderates survival could lie in its history. While it was the main conservative party without question for the first decades of the 1900s, it was overshadowed by the unrivalled electoral success of the Social Democrats in the 1940s. The Moderates started to fade into obscurity in the coming decades as they had lost the battle for Sweden on just about all fronts. Social democracy reigned supreme, conservatism was done cold. As the Social Democrats had at this point not yet become the high-tax and intensively redistributive party that they are today, the Moderates even largely lost business interests to the left too.
Despite being confined to the dustbin of history, the Moderates managed to reinvent themselves. When the centre-right regained power for what would amount to two full terms in 1976, the Moderates were not the main actors, but they continued to climb and produced their first prime minister for the first time in almost 60 years in 1991. Though this tenure was brief and crisis-ridden and the Moderates went on to suffer yet another electoral catastrophe in 2002, the party was unparallelled in its popularity in 2010 (for better or for worse, in post-Reinfeldtian retrospect).
This history of cyclical zeniths and nadirs tells that all is not lost for the Moderates. As a conservative observation, it can only be hoped however that the party reinvents itself next time as something that is compatible with the conservative and nationalist programme that Sweden and Europe must undergo.
The Moderates must find a way to ride the conservative winds yet find their niche on a political market that is very dominated by the Sweden Democrats. It is against this socially conservative nationalist movement that the Moderates need to bounce to usher in their next era of prosperity.
There is an avenue for the Moderates to become a truly low-tax and state-minimalist alternative, that once and for all dismantles the intrusive mechanisms of the Swedish bureaucracy. There exists a party sub-culture that can be likened to libertarianism and that is less locked in on incomes defining a person’s character, instead demanding less constraints and reservations about targeting unnecessary state spending. Occasional individual proposals to abolish Swedish public service media and other politically compromised institutions have been aired by Moderate representatives, but with no response from the party leadership. As a conservative, it would be preferable for the Moderates to lean into this movement rather than anything else – for the longevity of the larger Swedish right wing.