The Centre Cannot Hold

Today, my native Sweden votes. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that the election could result in the far-right Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats, SD) entering government for the first time.¹ Two days ago, my former colleague Martin Gelin wrote that Sweden had »lost its soul« and »stopped being Sweden«.²

»A political centre is not a point halfway between left and right. It’s a space of possibilities produced by shared constraints«

Gelin argues that Sweden has changed profoundly in the past four years, as positions once outside mainstream politics have become ordinary: »The Sweden Democrats have not changed in those years. But Sweden certainly has.« While I largely agree, I think there’s also another way of describing that change.

Why do things change in the first place? Everything comes into being through constraints. Given a situation, there are always more things that could happen than actually do. Some constraints are imposed by the world; others can be manipulated. A chair, a baby, a political ideology are all outcomes of possibilities being progressively eliminated until one particular thing remains. We make something by choosing, deliberately or otherwise, not to make everything else.

Politics does this collectively. Laws, institutions, conventions, permissions, and prohibitions determine what can become real and what cannot. A political centre is not a point halfway between left and right. It’s a space of possibilities produced by shared constraints. Change the constraints and you change the space. A possibility can remain perfectly intelligible while becoming politically unavailable.

The Sweden Democrats were founded in 1988 out of the Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish) movement, whose stated aim was to halt non-European immigration and repatriate non-ethnic Swedes.³ Its early leadership had direct connections to Swedish nazism and Heinrich Himmler’s combat forces: its first leader, Anders Klarström, had a conviction for making death threats against a Jewish television host, and its first auditor, Gustaf Ekström, had volunteered for the Waffen-SS.⁴ The party later declared a »zero tolerance« policy against racism and in 2018 forced out candidates with neo-Nazi links.⁵ But its origins help explain why cooperation with it was once itself a political boundary. It entered parliament in 2010 with 5.7 percent of the vote.⁶ What changed after that was not its electoral existence, but what the other parties were prepared to do with it. It is today Sweden’s second-largest party: in the last election, one in five Swedes voted for what nazis started.

Liberalerna – formerly Folkpartiet, a name once synonymous with Sweden’s liberal centre – shows the same process working the other way: not constraints loosening around a party, but the constraints that constituted a party’s own identity coming apart from within. It once helped define Sweden’s liberal political space: individual freedom, free movement, liberal immigration, freedom of expression, and the presumption that adults should be allowed to organise their own lives. Its last unambiguously liberal leader, Bengt Westerberg, resigned in 1995. Since then, the party has adopted positions that constrain many of the freedoms it once foregrounded: a 2002 campaign for a Swedish-language citizenship test,⁷ support in 2024 for police search powers that require no individual suspicion of a crime,⁸ a vote the same year for anonymous witnesses in criminal trials,⁹ and restrictions on mobile phones in schools and social media.¹⁰ These are not simply changes in policy. They eliminate possibilities that were once central to the party’s identity.

And in 2022, Liberalerna joined a government that depended on SD votes.¹¹ In 2021, Simona Mohamsson wrote she would »never« let her involvement be used to give the Sweden Democrats influence. In June 2025 she became party leader. Nine months later, on Friday the 13th of March, she stood beside SD leader Jimmie Åkesson and announced an agreement supporting Sweden Democrat ministers if the coalition wins today.¹²

Greek philosopher Plutarch’s old puzzle asks whether Theseus’s ship remains the same ship when its planks are replaced one by one.¹³ A political party can undergo the same process. Change its relationship to one constraint, then another, then another, and each decision may look like a small adjustment. Eventually, the object can occupy an entirely different relationship to the world while retaining the same name.

That is what makes the present situation stranger than a simple movement along a left-right axis. The constraints around the Sweden Democrats have loosened. The constraints that once helped constitute Liberalerna’s liberal identity have been altered to the point where the party now supports what it should reasonably abhor. In both cases, the political possibility space has changed dramatically.

And one result is a vacancy. A liberal position can still be described, argued for, and held by a voter. But the party system no longer offers an obvious place to put that vote. The Centre Party governed alongside Liberalerna in the same Alliance coalition from 2006 to 2014, and still describes itself as a party of »green, social, and decentralised liberalism«.¹⁴ It has drawn a hard line against governing with either the Sweden Democrats or the Left Party, and says it would rather see the Social Democrats lead the next government, while Liberalerna has opened the possibility of governing with the Sweden Democrats. The liberal position remains imaginable. What has disappeared is its institutional home.

We don’t know yet what the election result will be. But this change happened before anyone cast a vote. A political possibility can survive in the minds of voters while disappearing from the institutions that represent it. The centre is not a place between left and right. It’s a space a political system has to keep making. When it stops making it, you can still believe in it.

You just can’t vote for it.

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