When The Moderate Party's meeting in Västerås ends on Sunday, the party has adopted new policies in several areas that they hope will be election-winning in 2026.
It's a bit fateful, notes Jonas Hinnfors, professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.
He points out that M is fairly continuously below SD in opinion polls, something that is said to create stress internally.
In the 2022 parliamentary election, M only became the third largest party and clearly retreated in its traditionally strongest stronghold – the big cities, not least among women.
These are voters that M must attract back if they are to have a chance of winning the election, according to Hinnfors.
Babies in preschool
The question is how it will be done. Many left when the cooperation with SD began, and after the next election, SD may take a step further, into a government.
The government issue is simmering. Already now, when it's just a cooperation, there are those who feel discomfort, says Hinnfors.
The Moderate Party itself relies on the fact that the party's policy issues will yield results. And they see economic policy as one of their strongest cards.
At the meeting, they agreed, among other things, to lower the national tax that high-income earners pay, and emphasized that, for example, teachers and nurses often at some point in life exceed the threshold.
But they also tried to profile themselves in issues related to women's health, family life, and career. A proposal from Minister of Financial Markets Niklas Wykman was that parents on parental leave should be able to leave babies in preschool.
The party's optimism before the election is based on the fact that the gap between the Tidö parties and the red-greens has decreased in the compilation of opinion polls in recent times. In addition, a trend is visible, at least among their own voters, where more people think that Sweden is on the right track.
We want this election to be about values, because we believe that values are at stake, says M's election general Martin Borgs.
More values
At the same time, they are aware that SD continues to scare away voters.
Ida Drougge, vice chairman of the Moderate Women who also sat on the party's election-winning project, believes that M needs to become better at starting from people's everyday life, rather than technicalities in reforms and proposals. This is something that Martin Borgs also raises.
We need to get better at explaining why we do things. For example, that the visit bans have made the number of robberies in Nordstan halve, he says.
Jonas Hinnfors is skeptical about whether the efforts are enough. Despite an increased focus on "softer" issues, most voters will likely still perceive the paradigm shift in immigration and crime as the big project, he says.
And there, M is still the slightly paler copy of SD.
The sum is that this does not feel like a breakthrough.
