Moderaterna (M)

Moderaterna (Moderata samlingspartiet, M) is Sweden’s principal centre-right party, founded in 1904 as Allmänna valmansförbundet and rebranded under its current name in 1969. Across the twentieth century it represented the conservative and market-liberal tradition opposite the Social Democrats, briefly leading government under Carl Bildt in 1991–1994 and again under Fredrik Reinfeldt in the Alliance cabinets of 2006–2014.

The party returned to power on 18 October 2022 under Ulf Kristersson after the right-wing bloc won a narrow majority. On 14 October 2022 Moderaterna had signed the Tidö Agreement with Kristdemokraterna, Liberalerna and Sverigedemokraterna — the first formal cooperation contract bringing SD inside government-policy formation. The Tidö frame is the structural fact of the mandate: M leads a three-party cabinet that depends on SD support and shares policy negotiation with it.

In the 2022–2026 mandate the party visibly reorients around criminal policy, migration restriction, and security and defence — including Sweden’s NATO accession on 7 March 2024, which formally completed under an M-led cabinet. The 2025 Tidö-derived law-and-order and migration clusters land in force as the central legislative output of the period.

The deep value: the party that governs

Behind M’s hyphenated ideology — “liberal conservatism” — sits a value written into no idéprogram: to be a statsbärande parti, the party that governs and carries the state. The Moderates have seen themselves this way since Arvid Lindman in the 1900s. The “Bohman doctrine” of the 1970s brought the line back to life, and in 2006 it became the open ambition of the “New Moderates” project: to take the Social Democrats’ place as the country’s natural party of power. In his 2005 congress address “Välkommen till de nya moderaterna”, Fredrik Reinfeldt called the party straight back to Lindman’s “self-evident view” that the Moderates should be a statsbärande parti (full text in the Swedish speech archive svenskatal.se).

From here you can read reversals that otherwise look like betrayals of principle. When the liberal line — openness on migration, a cordon against the Sweden Democrats — collides with holding power, M chooses power: the hard migration turn after 2015 and the SD dependency in the 2022 Tidö Agreement. M’s hunger for power is a value too; it just isn’t written into the idéprogram — and it, not liberalism or conservatism, is the one that comes first. This is an interpretation, not a dry fact: it ties the party’s documented moves into a line, and the short “readings” on the values timeline lean on it.