Centre Party (Sweden)

Former four-leaf clover party logo used from 2005 until 2018

The 2006 Swedish general election was a success for the Centre Party. Its support had been slowly increasing through recent elections, receiving 5.1% of the votes in 1998 and increasing this to 6.2% in 2002.[20] In the 2006 Sedish general election, 7.88% of the vote went to the Centre Party, entitling the party to 29 of the 349 seats in the Riksdag.[21] Furthermore, their alliance with the other parties in the Alliance for Sweden, a centre-right coalition which won a majority of parliament seats in this election, meant that the Centre Party shared the ministry posts with their Alliance for Sweden allies, namely the Moderate Party, the Liberal People's Party and the Christian Democrats. The strong victory by the Centre Party has been studied by political scientist Lina M. Eriksson, who in her dissertation from the Department of Government at Uppsala University, entitled "Natural Disasters and National Election", performs a rigorous statistical analysis of election data combined with interviews with Maud Olofsson, Eskil Erlandsson, Ulrica Messing and Mona Sahlin. Eriksson's research finds that both the Indian Ocean's 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Cyclone Gudrun (Erwin) which struck only two weeks following the tsunami are major events that impacted government popularity in the general election and contributed to the redistribution of voter support within and across party-blocs, with particularly interesting results for the Centre Party. According to this research, "[t]he core findings from this thesis show that the Swedish Social Democratic Party (S) government's poor crisis response to Gudrun, which is the hitherto most costly natural disaster in Swedish history, alone has an estimated effect of a magnitude that likely contributed to the 2006 historic regime shift, while the tsunami also seems to have mattered. The tsunami is particularly interesting, as S's poor international crisis response to the event constitutes the first natural disaster situation to knowingly have affected an election on the other side of the planet. Moreover, to some degree voters recognized the active opposition by C as effective representation and rewarded the party for its strong stance on the poor handling of both events by S. In fact, the active voice of C concerning these disasters likely helped move the party from the periphery of party politics to becoming the third-largest party in Swedish politics".[22] Part of the dissertation has been published in Electoral Studies which is to be considered the leading scientific journal in election research. In the article,[23] long-term effects are also found over the 2010 and 2014 Swedish general elections, implying that the Cyclone Gudrun in particular triggered long-lasting changes in voter support from the left to the right side of the political spectrum. A comprehensive summary of the dissertation is available for download via Uppsala University.[24]

The party has been described as one of Sweden's most market liberal parties in liberal, socialist and conservative media.[25] However, the party describes itself as "a party with a green, social and decentralised liberalism".[26] The party leadership has advocated neoliberalism and right-libertarianism. The party advocates lower taxes, greatly reduced employer contributions, a freer market and an increased RUT-deduction. The party is a big advocator for small-business, farmers and entrepreneurs.[27] They also want to invest in the infrastructure and transportation so that employees could work in bigger cities but still live in the rural areas and vice versa. On economic policy, they view the Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats as their opponents.

The party is liberal on immigration, seeking to combine generous immigration policy with an initially more restrictive contribution policy to the immigrants. After the European migrant crisis, the party proposed to replace the existing establishment grants with establishment loans, similar to the Swedish student loans.[28]

The balance of the state responsibility of accepting refugees with their responsibility for integration into Swedish society is at the core of the party policy. In January 2016, the party for example proposed to give all immigrants compulsory civic education in both rights and expectations from the society.[29]

The party is a decentralist pro-European party that believes that the European Union is an important union to secure peace, freedom and trade between the European countries. The party also advocates a smaller but sharper European Union that focuses on democracy and peace, free movement and trade, vigorous action against climate change and collaboration against organized crime while also believing that Sweden should stay outside the monetary union and keep the krona as the currency.[30]

The party is a member of the ALDE party and its European Parliament group Renew Europe.[31] MEP Fredrick Federley is a vice-president of the ALDE Party[32] and the group leader of the ALDE group in the European Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy.