Ulf Kristersson

Ulf Kristersson became prime minister of Sweden on 18 October 2022, heading a three-party centre-right cabinet of Moderaterna, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, supported in the Riksdag by the Sweden Democrats on the basis of the Tidö Agreement signed four days earlier. He had led the Moderate party since October 2017, and his eight-year wait in opposition ended with the most consequential parliamentary reconfiguration since 2014.

The Tidöavtalet is the spine of his premiership: a written multi-area policy contract that gave the Sweden Democrats a formal seat at the policy-making table for the first time, in exchange for a stable parliamentary basis. The novelty was less the policy direction than the procedural break — a Swedish governing right that had spent more than a decade refusing such a deal had now signed one, and the Tidö frame structures everything from migration to criminal-law reform. In foreign policy the cabinet absorbed the 2023 Quran-burning crisis, which stalled NATO ratification by Turkey, before depositing Sweden’s NATO accession instrument in Washington on 7 March 2024 — the formal close of the post-Cold-War alliance question.

In domestic policy the second half of the mandate has been dominated by a self-described “largest reform of the Swedish penal system since the penal code was introduced” — including double penalties for gang-related crimes, lower minimum prison age, and indefinite security detention for the most violent offenders — alongside continued migration tightening (see 2025 and 2026). Whether these reforms hold up to the constitutional scrutiny they will eventually face is the open question of his second mandate.