Half a million people voted for the Centre Party – 475,000 to be precise. Among them were foreign-born and newly naturalised citizens drawn to the party's strong, liberal stance on immigration and integration.
In the year leading up to the election, the party pressured the government on unfair deportations of young adults, integrated working foreigners and British citizens, and raised the issue of fair transitional rules for citizenship.
In the campaign, it promised more. Bringing back transitional rules for citizenship applicants was number one on the party's priority list for after the election, or perhaps second after teen deportations, immigration spokesperson Niels Paarup-Petersen told The Local.
In its manifesto, the party promised to scrap the work permit salary threshold, stop "absurd deportations" of skilled foreign workers, and establish start-up visas for foreign entrepreneurs.
But more important than any of that was its promise to block any government dependent on the support of the vehemently anti-immigration (and arguably anti-immigrant) Sweden Democrats.
This wasn't something the party's leader Elisabeth Thand-Ringqvist said in passing, a pledge among others. It was her core offering: The Centre Party was the only party that would push for pro-business, economically liberal policies while closing the door to Sweden Democrat influence.
It was this that won it the votes of former supporters of the Liberal Party and Moderate Party. It was this that won it the vote of many readers of The Local, like Abhishek Mishra, who told us he abandoned the Moderate Party over transitional rules for citizenship. This was the reason why in the month before the election, the Centre was polling at 8 percent while the Liberal Party, with an otherwise similar ideology, was polling at 2 percent.
Ringqvist must have been asked about this by journalists every week since she took over the leadership in November last year. Occasionally, she specified ministers, or Sweden Democrat involvement in the government. But most often she ruled out supporting a government dependent on the far-right party in any way at all.
So when she abandoned this position last Friday, it was already a betrayal of all the voters who took her at her word. Many of those will be foreign-born, many of them readers of The Local.
For them, an even greater betrayal may be that in her demand at the press conference for competing "total package of policies and government configuration" from the rival candidates for prime minister, she didn't mention softening the draconian immigration reforms driven through over the past four years at all.
If in the coming week or weeks, she decides to back or join a government led by Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson, it's hard not to agree that this is "the biggest betrayal in modern political history".
That's not to say Thand Ringqvist is in an easy spot. If she concedes to the Left Party's demand for cabinet ministers, many on the other side will consider that a betrayal, too.
You can even argue – as my colleague James Savage did in another opinion piece – that while the Left Party continues to insist on ministerial positions, backing Kristersson is the least illiberal option. Ringqvist, he argues, has also said the Centre Party would never back a government with Left Party ministers, and while the Sweden Democrats would be able to topple a minority Kristersson government and block its policies, they wouldn't actually be part of it.
This is to ignore the fact that Thand-Ringqvist went into the campaign backing Magdalena Andersson as prime minister.
Would the Centre Party have received even half as many votes if it had gone into the election with only its red lines against the Left Party and Sweden Democrats and no preferred prime ministerial candidate? It's doubtful. A vote for the Centre Party was, in part, a vote for a government led by Magdalena Andersson with centre-right economic policies.
Some voters will feel they're the victims of a kind of political confidence trick, that Thand-Ringqvist has stolen perhaps a hundred thousand economically liberal, pro-Magdalena Andersson, anti-Sweden Democrat votes, and given them to the other side.
You can argue this is nothing new: in 2019 the Centre Party and Liberal Party allowed a Social Democrat prime minister to take power, even though they had campaigned in the 2018 election for Ulf Kristersson to be prime minister. That's how coalition-building works in parliamentary systems with proportional representation.
Back then the Social Democrats paid an eye-watering price in policy concessions. Perhaps the same will happen this time around. Perhaps the Centre Party will get the immigration reforms in its manifesto. Perhaps Kristersson will agree to let people who had applied for citizenship before stricter rules came in to have their applications judged under the old rules.
Without a majority, though, will the far-right Sweden Democrats let them pass any of it? What's to stop the Sweden Democrats, a couple of years into the parliament, blocking a budget unless the government moves forward with the proposal to revoke existing permanent residency permits?
As Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson, a close student of Danish politics, will know all too well, such a Kristersson government would be in much the same position as Danish minority governments in the 2000s and again after 2015, when the far-right Danish People's Party used its parliamentary leverage to push through some of Europe's toughest immigration restrictions, without ever having to take responsibility for governing.
Right now, for a foreigner it is incredible to watch Sweden's åsiktkorridor – the famously narrow range of acceptable consensus opinion – in motion. The dramatic shedding of a party's core moral and political belief, something that until only a few weeks ago was seen as so outlandish that it was ruled out by most commentators, is now suddenly unremarkable.
If Thand-Ringqvist does open the way for Ulf Kristersson to return as prime minister, it seems Sweden will quickly adjust to the new reality. But those foreigners and newly naturalised citizens who trusted her are unlikely to ever forget it.
What do you think about the shift in the Centre Party's position? Tell us in the comments.
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