The Christian Democrats ( , KD) is a Christian democratic political party in Sweden founded in March 1964. It first entered parliament in 1985, through electoral cooperation with the Centre Party; in 1991, the party won seats on its own. The party leader since 25 April 2015 has been Ebba Busch.
The party name was initially abbreviated to KDS (standing for , Christian Democratic Unity), from its foundation in 1964 to 1996, when the party changed its name to the current Christian Democrats and its abbreviation to KD.
The party was a minor party in centre-right coalition governments led by Moderate Party Prime Ministers Carl Bildt from 1991 to 1994 and Fredrik Reinfeldt from 2006 to 2014, with the latter under a formalised cooperation within the Alliance for Sweden. The party has been a minor party in the coalition government led by Moderate Party Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson since 2022, this time with Moderate Party and the Liberals with support from the Sweden Democrats.
The KD sits with the European People's Party in the European Parliament, and is a member of Centrist Democrat International and International Democracy Union in which both contain other Christian democratic parties.
Ideology
Ideologically, the KD is a Christian democratic party that since the 2010s has shifted to the right and adopted more conservative policies.
According to the party, their five most important policy issues include:
Healthcare: reform the healthcare system and nationalise Swedish healthcare. Improve care guarantee. Reform the queue billion. Save supported living. Elderly care: retirement home guarantee as well as an abolished pensions tax. The KD also supports housing supplements for the elderly. The Christian Democrats especially emphasize the elderly's right to a dignified life and want to introduce a higher standard for nursing homes. Safety: more police officers and more resources to the police. The party also supports law and order policies, such as increasing resources for the police and stricter laws against sexual crimes and honor killings. Family: enable more time for the children, facilitate family formation, increase families' room for maneuver, upgrade parenthood, enable different forms of childcare and strengthen the finances of families with children. The party supports freedom of choice of parents for education and increased resources for schools in vulnerable areas. Integration: according to the party, jobs are one of the keys to good integration and that a society is built on a common set of values, where certain values are immutable.
KD's platform and policies have been shaped by the tenets of Christian democracy, stewardship, and the shared responsibility between the church and political institutions, the responsibility of solidarity towards fellow human beings and the safeguarding of civil society, permeated with socially and culturally conservative values.
The KD supports reducing petrol prices and abolishing the property tax. The KD also supports the monarchy.
The Christian Democrats want a flexible immigration policy, but one that is regulated and controlled. The party names a Nordic level when it comes to immigration, meaning the amount of refugees that enter Sweden should be at the same level as in the other Nordic countries. The KD also calls for a socially just but efficient asylum policy in which resources can be allocated to those in need in tandem with faster screening and quicker deportation of those who fail or abuse the asylum claiming processes, as well as increased spending on border patrol police. It also wants to introduce a special integration committee in the Riksdag and compulsory measures for refugees to learn Swedish and adopt Swedish customs and social norms. Since 2018, the party has pledged a tougher line against immigration and multiculturalism, including opposing the Islamic call to prayer in public spaces.
On foreign policy, the KD is largely supportive of Sweden's membership of the European Union. They were in favour of entering the eurozone during the 2003 Swedish euro referendum, but after the “No” side won the referendum in a landslide victory the party changed its stance and are now against joining the eurozone. They are calling for "a narrower and sharper EU" and that "on a number of issues, the EU need to take a step back and give more power back to the nation states”.
History
Background The party had its roots in a movement against the Swedish government's decision in 1963 to remove religious education from the elementary school syllabus. An organisation called "Christian Social Responsibility", which would later become the Christian Democratic Unity, organised several marches against the decision, one of which became one of the largest in Swedish modern history. Despite the public outcry and over 2.1 million protest signatures, the decision went through. The group that had worked in the campaign felt it was a sign that Swedish politics needed a Christian Democratic Party.
The political and social origins of the Swedish Christian Democrats clearly differ from those of the European continental Christian Democratic parties (as in Italy or Germany). In those countries, Christian Democracy represented the mainstream of the social-conservative political forces and was closely tied to majoritarian religious practice. In Sweden, however, Christian Democracy emerged as a minority grouping amongst the centre-right forces and was tied to minority-religious tendencies in society (particularly among voters associated with the free churches and likeminded Lutherans).
Founding In the beginning of 1964, Lewi Pethrus, founder of the Swedish Pentecostal movement and chief editor of the Swedish newspaper Dagen, discussed the idea of a Swedish Christian democratic party on the editorial pages of Dagen. He stated that many people had contacted him about the idea and that the current Swedish political climate was dominated by atheist economic materialism.
Principal Algot Tergel hosted a conference on 7 February of the same year. The topic of the conference was "Christianity and Politics", and during the conference the idea of starting a Christian Democratic Party was discussed. A committee consisting of Pethrus and eight other Free Church leaders was formed.
A large and widespread debate followed the decision to create the committee. Dagen published an interview with Kjell Bondevik, the leader of the Norwegian Christian Democratic Party, and there were talks about creating a Christian Democratic Party in Finland as well.
On 20 March 1964, the party was founded as Christian Democratic Unity (). At first, it was only an organisation, but at a board meeting later that year it was decided that the organisation would be revamped into a party and that it would compete in the national elections in Sweden. The first roughly 100 members elected Birger Ekstedt to the post of party chair and Lewi Pethrus to the post of vice chair.
The party grew rapidly; by the end of the year, it had 14,500 members.
Early years During its early years, the KDS was sometimes called the "Air and Water" party because of its strong emphasis on environmental politics. At that time the Green Party of Sweden did not exist, and thus the Christian Democratic Unity had a unique appeal with its environmentally friendly policies. In the Swedish national elections of 1964 the party gained 1.8% of the vote, not enough to get any seats in the Riksdag, but the party already had influence at the municipal level. In the municipal elections of 1966 the party gained 354 seats.
At this time, the established major parties of Sweden began discussing new ways of making it more difficult for minor parties to enter the Riksdag. The Riksdag was reformed in 1971; with this came the D'Hondt method of allocating seats. The electoral threshold was set at 4%, which meant that the wanted political breakthrough was far away now.
Birger Ekstedt died in 1972, aged 51, only a few days after having been reelected as the party chair. An emergency congress was called; there Alf Svensson, the relatively unknown chair of the youth wing of the party, was elected chair. Svensson was to become one of the most important figures in modern Swedish politics. In the national elections of 1973 the party gained 1.8% of the vote, the same result as in the two preceding elections.
Before the national elections of 1976, there was a strong call for a change to a right-wing government in Sweden. The organisation "Vote right-wing" was formed to promote the change to a right-wing government. The KDS, however, announced a desire not to be placed on the traditional right-wing/left-wing scale, a measurement system it felt was outdated. Therefore, the "Vote right-wing" organisation started a campaign of negative campaigning against the KDS with the slogan "Don't vote for KDS, don't throw away your vote" as the KDS had not reached the 4% threshold at the last elections. The effect of this large campaign on a small and relatively new party like the KDS was disastrous, and it gained only 1.4% of the vote in the 1976 election.
At the start of the 1980s, the party revamped its entire political manifesto. The party abandoned its conservative stance on abortion and instead assumed a moderate pro-choice stance and adopted a plank to work to lower the total number of abortions in Sweden through encouragement of individual voluntary measures instead. In the 1980 nuclear power referendums the party supported the "no" campaign, which meant opposing any further construction of new nuclear power-plants in Sweden and advocating the phasing-out of all nuclear power plants in Sweden within 10 years, together with increased investments in renewable energy.
In 1982, the Christian Democratic Women's League was founded, and the party gained 1.9% of the votes, for the first time getting more than 100,000 votes.
Way into the Riksdag As early as 1978, the KDS discussed the idea of electoral cooperation with the Centre Party. Similar ideas were discussed before the 1982 elections but were never put into action. One of the proponents of such a collaboration was the then secretary of information Mats Odell. The party officially took a stance against a socialist government, which effectively put them together with the right-wing block.
The negotiations were difficult, but in 1984 the Centre Party and KDS agreed to run under a joint banner in the next year's elections under the name ("The Centre").
The deal, which was heavily criticised by the Swedish Social Democratic Party, meant that each party had its own voting ticket but that the Centre Party should nominate a Christian Democratic candidate on at least five of the regional candidacy lists. The Centre Party ticket would win over the KDS ticket almost everywhere, but this way there would be at least five Christian Democrats in the Riksdag. The Centre Party did not fulfil its promise, however, and put a Christian Democrat on the list only in the municipality of Kalmar. This resulted in great tensions within the Christian Democrats; one of the party icons, the environmental activist Björn Gillberg, left the party. However, Alf Svensson managed to get into the Riksdag through the KDS party ticket in Jönköping.
Real breakthrough In 1987, the party manifesto was revamped once again (although not so heavily as the last time), and the party changed its name to Christian Democratic Social Party ( ), while adjusting the abbreviation to KdS . In the 1988 national elections the party grew significantly and gained 2.8% of the votes. But the Centre Party did not wish any further electoral cooperation, and Alf Svensson had to leave the Riksdag. Something had happened, however. The party was now recognised as one of the major parties in Sweden, and Svensson had become famous. According to many opinion polls, he was the most popular politician in the entire nation.