Ulf Kristersson

Ulf Kristersson (born December 29, 1963, Lund, Sweden) is a Swedish politician, leader of the Moderate Party (2018– ) and prime minister of Sweden (2022– ). Kristersson led a centre-right coalition that formed the first government open to and dependent upon the support of the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats.

Early life and political career

A child of academic parents, Kristersson was born in Lund, in southern Sweden, and grew up in Torshälla, a longtime steel-making town outside Eskilstuna in the län (county) of Södermanland, in east-central Sweden. As a youth he was an elite gymnast. As early as his teenage years, he began showing a keen interest in politics, and, while a high-school student at St. Eskil’s Gymnasium in Eskilstuna, Kristersson and some friends formed a chapter of the Moderate School Youth (Moderat skolungdom), the Moderate Party’s organization for junior-school- and high-school-aged Swedes. Following graduation from high school, Kristersson served in the military.

Having matriculated at Uppsala University in 1985, he earned an economics degree in 1988. That year Kristersson was elected chair of the Moderate Youth League (Moderata ungdomsförbundet). Four years later, when the organization met in Lycksele, it was riven by an ideological conflict between a libertarian faction, led by Kristersson, and a conservative faction, led by Fredrik Reinfeldt, who would unseat Kristersson as chair. The so-called Battle of Lycksele was the beginning of a long political rivalry between Kristersson and Reinfeldt.

In 1991 Kristersson began nearly a decade as a member of the Riksdag (Parliament). His tenure included membership in the social insurance committee (1994–2000), the education committee (1991–98), and the labour market committee (1991–98). During this period he also worked as marketing manager for the free market think tank Timbro (1995–98) and was the author or coauthor of no fewer than four more books, including Non-Working Generation (1994), in which he controversially compared Swedish labour market regulations to apartheid, characterizing them as oppressive and arguing that they fostered passivity. In 2000 he returned to the private sector full-time, serving as communications director for Internet technology consulting company Connecta/Adcore (2000–01), as communications consultant for Nextwork AB (2001–02), and as chair of the board of Adoptionscentrum (2003–05).

In 2002 Kristersson returned to elected office, becoming the municipal commissioner responsible for the finance and economic matters (effectively mayor) of Strängnäs, a small town in Södermanland. He remained in that position until 2006, when he became a deputy mayor for Stockholm (serving until 2010). In the meantime, Kristersson’s old rival Fredrik Reinfeldt had risen to become leader of the Moderates in 2003 and prime minister in 2006. In 2010 Reinfeldt appointed Kristersson minister of social security, a portfolio he maintained until 2014, when he was reelected to the Riksdag, representing Södermanland. Back in the Riksdag, Kristersson served as deputy chair of the finance committee (2014–17) and as economic-political spokesperson (2014–17).

Personal life

Kristersson is married. He and his wife are the parents of three adopted daughters from China. They have a Welsh Springer Spaniel. Kristersson enjoys hunting, running, nature walks, and photography. He is also a fan of the comic book and cartoon character Tintin.

From Moderate Party leader to prime minister

Having spent much of its early history as a right-wing fringe party, the Moderate Party shifted toward the centre in the 1980s as it rose to become Sweden’s second largest party and participated in ruling coalition governments. The growing popularity of the extreme right-wing anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats in 2010s, however, began to push the Moderates farther to the right again, particularly after the huge influx of migrants to Sweden as a result of the 2015 migrant crisis, in which more than one million migrants entered Europe after fleeing turmoil in the Middle East (most notably the Syrian Civil War) and Africa. Nevertheless, even after the Sweden Democrats made significant inroads with supporters of the Moderates, Reinfeldt refused to countenance any political involvement with the Sweden Democrats, let alone the possibility of their participation in a ruling coalition. After the 2014 election brought defeat for the Moderates and about a 13 percent share of the vote for the Sweden Democrats, Reinfeldt’s replacement as party leader, Anna Kinberg Batra, indicated her willingness to negotiate with the Sweden Democrats. Opposition to that stance and broader disenchantment with her leadership forced her resignation, and in 2017 Kristersson was elected leader.

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He led the Alliance bloc—comprising the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats, and the Centre Party—into the 2018 parliamentary elections, in which it, like the ruling Social Democrat–Green Party coalition, captured about 40 percent of the vote, whereas the Sweden Democrats received about 18 percent. Despite the resulting hung parliament, both the Social Democrats and the Moderates remained adamantly opposed to governing with the Sweden Democrats. Neither the incumbent, Social Democrat Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, nor Kristersson was able win enough support from other parties to cobble together a government. Ultimately, after months of a caretaker government, Löfven was able to form a minority government, though his grasp on power was tenuous. He would lose a vote of confidence in June 2021 and be replaced as Social Democratic party leader and prime minister in November by Magdalena Andersson.

Meanwhile, even as they stepped up their anti-immigrant rhetoric, the Jimmie Åkesson-led Sweden Democrats sought to soften their image and distance themselves from their neo-Nazi roots. That change of image contributed to a new willingness by Moderates (including Kristersson) and other centre-right parties to consider cooperating with the Sweden Democrats, as did the perception among a growing number of Swedes that the country’s increase in crime and gang-related violence was due to the influx of immigrants. When results were counted in the September 2022 parliamentary elections, the right-wing bloc (including the Sweden Democrats) had secured 176 seats compared with 173 seats for the Social Democrat-led Red-Green bloc. Negotiations then proceeded between the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, and the Sweden Democrats that produced the “Tidö Agreement” (named for the castle in which the dealmaking had taken place), which established a Moderate–Christian Democrat–Liberal government backed by the Sweden Democrats in exchange for the coalition’s promises to pursue a number of policies advocated by the Sweden Democrats, including more stringent border controls and harsher sentences for criminals.

Kristersson became prime minister on October 18, 2022. Among the challenges he faced was guiding Sweden’s ongoing response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier in the year. In May Sweden had joined Finland in applying for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Having long been content to work with NATO informally, Sweden had revised its defense calculus in light of Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. In July NATO accepted the applications of both Sweden and Finland, and the accession process, which required national ratification by the organization’s 30 member states, moved ahead relatively smoothly except for protracted opposition from Turkey, which took issue with Swedish and Finnish support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant Kurdish nationalist organization that Turkey regarded as a terrorist group, and from Hungary, which was angered by Finland and Sweden’s criticism of antidemocratic measures undertaken by its Viktor Orbán-led government. In addition, Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was enraged when a Swedish far-right politician set fire to a Qurʾān outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm in January 2023. By March, Hungary and Turkey had dropped their objections to the candidacy of Finland, which formally joined NATO in early April, but they remained adamant in their opposition to Sweden’s accession.

In early November 2022 Kristersson had traveled to Ankara to meet with Erdoğan in an attempt to overcome the Turkish leader’s stonewalling. Later that month, the Swedish constitution was amended to make it possible to institute tougher anti-terrorism laws, and in May 2023 the Riksdag enacted legislation that made it illegal to provide financial or logistical support for a terrorist organization. Nevertheless, as a NATO summit set for July in Lithuania approached, Erdoğan made clear that he would persist in blocking Swedish membership in the organization. However, to the surprise of most observers, on the eve of the summit, Erdoğan met with Kristersson and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and agreed to forward Sweden’s accession protocol to Turkey’s Grand National Assembly and to work to ensure ratification. In return, Sweden agreed to continue cooperation on counterterrorism efforts and increase economic involvement with Turkey, resumed arms sales to the Turks, and pledged to support Turkey’s EU accession process. Moreover, NATO announced that it would establish a new “special coordinator for counterterrorism.” Hungary quickly indicated that it too would move to approve Sweden’s NATO membership.