Tidö Agreement 2022

On 14 October 2022 the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals signed an agreement with the Sweden Democrats at Tidö Castle. The 62-page document set Ulf Kristersson‘s government programme for 2022–2026 and defined seven “cooperation projects” — from criminal policy and migration to healthcare, energy and education. The Sweden Democrats, the largest party of the right bloc, stayed outside the cabinet but gained, for the first time, a formal influence over its policy.

It is the clearest Swedish case of contract parliamentarism — governing through a written agreement with support parties. One important caveat: Tidö did not invent the technique. Its immediate precursor was the December Agreement of 2014, and the most detailed on policy was the January Agreement of 2019 with its 73 points. Tidö’s novelty is not that it is an agreement, but how far it binds the machinery of government itself.

Here is the verifiable core of the claim that “a party with no ministerial portfolios has gained control over legislation.” Under the agreement, the support party outside the government has “full and equal influence” over matters in the cooperation projects — “in the same way as the governing parties”: it takes part in preparing inquiry directives, government bills, and regulatory changes. To exercise it, the Sweden Democrats received their own coordination office, staffed with political officials inside the Government Offices (Regeringskansliet) — without a single ministerial post, and so without ministerial responsibility. The wording matters: this is not literal control over every law — the influence is equal, not unilateral, and bounded to the (broad) cooperation projects. But a support party built into the Government Offices, entitled to join the preparation of directives, bills and regulations without carrying ministerial responsibility, has no direct precedent in Swedish governance.

Human-rights organisations judge not the procedure but the content. Civil Rights Defenders reviewed the agreement and concluded that it “contains a series of measures that clearly go against the human rights standards that Sweden is bound by” and leads the country in “a more repressive and anti-democratic direction”; their report a year on was titled “As a whole, it is worrying.” Amnesty International warned that several points risk “seriously threatening both the rule-of-law principles and other fundamental human rights.” These are civil-society assessments, not adjudicated rulings.

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