På torsdagskvällen var jag inbjuden att hålla tal hos konservativ klubb i Bryssel.
Inför ett 30-tal gäster från olika europeiska länder och med olika uppdrag i partigrupper, tankesmedjor, EU-organ eller inom näringslivet gav jag min syn på samhällsutvecklingen under de nästa 50 år som jag nu kan överblicka.
Här är mina noteringar.
Remarks at Conservative Dinner, 4 June 2026 in Brussels
Okay. One big advantage of getting older is that you can use your own memories to review political developments over almost half a century.
So much has happened since the 1970s on every conceivable level. My purpose here tonight is to try to describe how the world around me has changed and forced me to find new allies – again and again.
Politics is like the ocean. It moves with the ebb and flow of the tides, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, like a storm. But I want to claim that I’m fixed as a lighthouse on solid conservative rock, shining a light on the hazards around me. (I had help with that wording.)
I am from a working-class family where no previous generation had more than seven years of formal education. I started working on the state railway during the summers and school breaks. At this accounting office, almost all of the 30 men were born in the 1910s and 20s. They would soon retire. No one had academic education, except for the boss.
They had started working outside on the railroad in their teens. And they were all Social Democrats.
But! They were of an absolutely different kind of political left than today. In the present time we could easily call them conservative. Their identity and view of life and society were completely different from the one that dominates today.
- Instead of being offended, they were proud.
- Rather than demanding benefits, they were concerned about fulfilling their duties.
- Instead of sugar-coating their messages, they spoke plainly
(if you did something wrong, you were told). - Rather than complaining about society, they discussed what should be done about the problems.
They belonged to a generation that built our society. As Swedes, they had not been to war. But they had worked hard to create a better community for their children than they themselves have had. At lunchbreaks we had many discussions. I learned a lot about the views and values of an older generation.
Most memorable was how proud they were. I can’t emphasize that enough. For me, that’s the biggest difference I can see between then and now. People with ordinary work were proud, and acted so they could continue to be proud of themselves.
Let me give you a concrete example. One of the guys had lost his townhouse in a landslide a few years earlier. Parts of his residential area were built on mud that had slid down into the river.
When the affected homeowners met with the insurance companies, it became clear that it would take a long time before they would receive the insurance money. They were advised to ask for welfare relief at the social service office.
I had never seen my colleague so angry as when he told me about this advice. “Should I and my family receive social benefits? Over my dead body!”
Since then, I have read that the Social Democrats in the 1960s and 70s had difficulty getting the working class to apply for welfare benefits from the government. It was seen as a problem that Swedes were too proud to ask for support from the government.
This willingness to take responsibility and do one’s duty challenges the left’s view of civil rights. Unfortunately, the Social Democrats eventually succeeded in breaking this work ethic. The following generations have come to see themselves as victims, who must be rescued and provided for by the government.
I would argue that this dependency on subsidies and the worldview that you yourself are helpless, is an important reason why many young people today are confused and become worried, angry, offended or depressed. They don’t understand what life is all about – taking control of once own life and becoming self-sufficient.
*
For my part, I got involved with the Center Party in the late 70s. It was then the established farmers’ party that had managed to overthrow the long-standing Social Democratic hold on power in Sweden – for four decades. I have no ties to agriculture, but Prime Minister Thorbjörn Fälldin, who was a farmer, impressed me.
He beat the hero of the left, the internationally known Olof Palme. Not in one election, but two. Of course Fälldin was accused of aligning with right-wing extremists and his victory was called a coup d’état.
Being down to earth was his success. He talked about everyday problems instead of grandiose utopian promises. He focused on how things actually are: not how intellectuals believe they should be. That is why people trusted him. He spoke about the importance of manual labor, the kind of work that gets dirt under your nails. And he always began his annual speech at the party congress by stating that the Swedish society is built on a Christian foundation.
When the party nominating committee, years later, asked him to step aside, he responded with a line from the King James Bible: “Thy will be done.” Although he uttered these words sarcastically – he wanted to continue as party leader – they reflected a politician still grounded in Christian values.
When Fälldin resigned in 1985, his successor moved the party to the liberal left.
Looking at today’s Centre Party where I had many of my friends as a young adult, I sometimes think: they never grew up. They abandoned responsibility in favor of posturing.
I left party politics and worked as an economist and accountant for NGOs, and later independently. My role was simple: to ensure that money was spent properly. In many ways, that is also what I do today – as a member of the European parliament and of the Committee on Budgetary Control: Examining how funds are used and misused.
But I couldn’t keep away from policy and politics. I became involved with the business think tank Timbro. At that time it was portrayed as extremist by mainstream media. Sweden was heavily regulated and market solutions needed more space. Personal freedom was something that in Sweden came to be seen as an economically liberal stance, but in the United Kingdom and United States, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were conservatives who challenged both an overgrown government and defended individual responsibilities.
The neoliberal wave in Sweden was refreshing in its criticism of state supremacy. I had no problem working with classically liberal opinion leaders when it came to free the people from overwhelming regulations and excessive power from the state.
At Timbro, I focused on a growing imbalance as the left constantly spoke about rights but rarely about duties. Benefits were emphasized. Responsibility was neglected.
I wrote an essay in the middle of the 90s, “The Morality of Weakness,” arguing that a society which disconnects rights from duties ultimately weakens itself. That essay became a bestseller among Timbro-publications.
I don’t know if you know the author Johan Norberg? He is now a senior fellow at the American libertarian think tank Cato Institute. At Timbro, thirty years ago, we had many discussions about what freedom was. We didn’t agree on everything, but we were both in opposition to the “one party state” as we called the long legacy of the Social Democratic rule.
At its best, Timbro defended not only market freedom, but the value of the individual—not just as an economic actor, but as a moral agent.
Here I came into contact with many sharp thinkers throughout history. For example the German economist and longtime minister of industry, Ludwig Erhard. He was once asked whether small private vegetable gardens managed by ordinary people should be discouraged in the name of efficiency. He replied: no. Because society is not only an economic system, it is a human one.
Figures like Aristotle and Bismarck understood that a functioning society requires more than markets: it requires structure, responsibility, and shared norms.
Here we have a difference in perspective between libertarians and conservatives. But we could still discuss and agree about the faults of socialism.
*
Then 9/11 happened.
For many, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the wall had marked the end of ideological struggle. The West had won. But that conclusion was premature.
The conflict was no longer primarily economic. It was civilizational.
For me, Islamism and its war against our Christian civilization became the new dominant contradiction, not the Cold War and the struggle between communism and capitalism.
In my view, liberals, and Timbro, remained trapped in the “end of history” mindset, a form of neoliberal utopian globalism. After ten active years, I left.
My liberal friends refused to acknowledge that Islam, or religion in general, had any significance for us in the West. They dismissed criticism of Islam as racism and xenophobia.
I became a columnist in “The World today” a leading Christian newspaper, owned by the Pentecostal Movement. It was associated with its famous pastor, Ulf Ekman and portrayed in the media as extremist. Here I was able to discuss the Western world’s moral roots in Christianity and how big the differences are to the Muslim world. It was – and is – a Clash of Civilizations, as Samuel Huntington wrote.
And I published chronicles about how individual freedom is intimately connected to responsibility and duties, something liberals ignore and – on this point resemble the left.
*
Then came the wave of refugees in 2015. And while Christian circles were carried along by shifting political currents, I remained anchored to the same conservative principles.
I criticized the open borders when even religious institutions wanted to help all the migrants and let everyone in the world come and stay in Sweden. My last article had the topic: Christians should not confuse the government with God.
You’re supposed to save people from drowning, of course, but that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to take responsibility for their livelihood for the rest of their lives.
There is a difference between immediate compassion and permanent obligation. That distinction disappeared.
And there is a big difference between receiving a small number of migrants – like Sweden has done in hundreds of years – and taking in millions in a decade or two. Volume plays a crucial role for society. Neither Christians, liberals, nor socialists understand this.
The welfare state is based on a social contract with rights andobligations. A large number of people cannot suddenly appear from abroad and demand rights. Then the social system collapses. Only conservatives have understood this.
Sweden developed a kind of moral overreach—the belief that we have the whole world in our hands. That is not faith. That is a political illusion.
And now we are paying the price for our naivety. Shootings, bombings, rapes, gangs and corruption are dissolving our social structures.
*
After being outside party politics for 15 years, I had to engage again in 2015. The only voice of clarity during the migrant crisis was the Sweden Democrats. The party was, and on the left still is, regarded as extremist.
I had dinner with Mattias Karlsson, a member of the party leadership and offered to write reports and materials for the party. But he offered me to take over the online newspaper that the party had begun to be dissatisfied with.
I managed to increase the unique daily visitors from 3,000 to 20,000. Since I was fairly well-known in the media world, I was invited to numerous live panels on TV and radio.
Suddenly I was one of the most recognizable Sweden Democrats in the country. And after eight years in social media I was elected as one of the party’s three Members of European parliament in 2024.
*
So, to conclude, my journey have let me participate in different political and ideological environments, from workplaces with social democratic blue-collar workers, to agrarian down-to-earth politicians, to neoliberal freedom fighters, to Christian sermons in defense of our civilization and finally to a new conservative movement fighting against establishments who don’t understand what happens when globalization runs amok.
The strange thing is that I have felt at home in every one of these environments – as long as their topics were focused on what to me was common sense. Over time, as new perspectives have come to dominate politics, our interpretations drifted apart about which values should be prioritized.
Unfortunately, there are man who don’t realize how complex our human societies are. It is only with conservative views you are able to have a pragmatic outlook which allows your values to meet reality. As it is.
And those who are pragmatic (in the long term) have absurdly been called extremists by those progressives who now tear everything down.
I think the reason for this is that for a long time, since the Enlightenment, progressives were right in many ways. About democracy, equality and science. But in the last half century it has passed its zenith. To continue in the direction of the tangent no longer leads to progress but to destruction of our civilization.
Conservatives have the audacity to point this out. In that sense we become extremists for those with a progressive outlook. We want to return politics to reality. How can we be so horrible?
Thank you!