Kristdemokraterna (KD)
Kristdemokraterna (Christian Democrats, KD), founded 1964 and in the Riksdag continuously since 1991, is a value-conservative centre-right party and one of the four signatories of the 2022 Tidö Agreement; in the 2022–2026 mandate party leader Ebba Busch serves as deputy prime minister in the Kristersson cabinet.
Kristdemokraterna (KD) is Sweden’s Christian-democratic party, founded in 1964 as Kristen Demokratisk Samling by activists from the free-church tradition. After more than twenty-five years outside the Riksdag, the party entered parliament in 1991 under Alf Svensson and has held seats continuously since. Across the Alliance years it sat in the Reinfeldt cabinets of 2006–2014 as a junior coalition partner.
The party is one of the four signatories of the Tidö Agreement signed on 14 October 2022 with Moderaterna, Liberalerna and Sverigedemokraterna. Since 18 October 2022, party leader Ebba Busch has served as deputy prime minister in the Kristersson cabinet and as minister of energy, business and industry — KD’s most visible cabinet role in its history.
Ideologically KD is value-conservative on social issues, market-positive in economic policy, and aligned with the wider Tidö priorities on law-and-order and migration restriction. The party was historically an early supporter of NATO membership inside the right bloc, a position that gained the wider mainstream after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent 2024 NATO accession.
The deep value: a fixed core, allies by calculation
KD’s Christian core — human dignity, family, solidarity — does not change in its words: it stands in the programme of 2001 and of 2025 alike. What is flexible is something else — the choice of allies. After years balancing around 4 percent, the party reconsidered its old distance from the Sweden Democrats for a place in the right bloc.
The turn began well before Tidö: as early as 2019, Busch opened KD to talks with every Riksdag party and, that summer, held a public “meatball lunch” with Åkesson — breaking a taboo the establishment had held for years. And in 2025 the party removed the clause that had explicitly ruled out governing with those whose values lay far from its own — that is, SD. The core stayed in the text; the door to cooperation opened. This is a reading, not a neutral fact; for the full frame, see the essay power or principle.