The Liberals's Party Board have announced that their goal in 2022 is to return a centre-right government. If they manage to stay in government, they almost certainly would join an M+KD government, even if it had external support from SD.
If they manage to survive, even narrowly, that would greatly boost the chances of a conservative government. If they narrowly miss the threshold, however, they could take hundreds of thousands of votes and a dozen seats with them, and risk such a government (not unlike FI narrowly missing in 2014 and taking 195,000 votes and 15 seats that could have boosted the centre-left coalition).
The declaration must be confirmed by the party council vote as well.
How did Liberals even get to where they are now? I know this isn't the first time they're trying to shift to the right (there was some anti-immigration stuff in the early 2000s), but they've always been essentially a classical liberal party, right?. Surely it would have made more sense for Centre to do this and for Liberals to be led by someone like Annie Lööf* and transform into sort-of libertarians?
* There's, um, this: youtube.com/watch?v=4F1QdZoqPsI
Eh, the term classical liberal isn't really the most fitting description of the Liberals now or historically. They've mostly been a social liberal party which had strong ties to the temperance movement for most of the 20th century (and were therefore strong defenders of the state monopoly on alcohol sales) and during the 60s and 70s they were definitely the party on the centre-right that was the closest to the left. During the 80s and 90s the most libertarian-ish politicians you could find were usually members of the Moderates (the youth league in particular) and later that became the case in the Centre Party. That was generally a result of then-leader Maud Olofsson actively seeking to move the Centre Party rightwards in order to be seen as a more reliable part of the centre-right after the party's budget deals with the Social Democrats from 95-97. This could be said to be the origin of the libertarian streak you find in the Centre Party today.
The dividing line within the Liberals ever since the 90s hasn't really been between classical liberals and conservative liberals, but between social liberals and conservative liberals. Where the social liberal wing represents the traditional Liberal position of emphasising support for various social programs, gender equality and the social safety net, and the conservative liberals were inspired by the success of Venstre in Denmark and placed emphasis on issues concerning law and order, integration and immigration.
The conservative liberal lean that the party has now can be explained by how key members of the leadership (including Sabuni herself) were closely involved with the previous conservative liberal turn in the early 2000s which saw a spectacular success in the 2002 election. They seem to be under the impression that returning to what worked for them then will be what's going to revive their fortunes once more. Which seems kind of naive since they didn't have three parties to their right competing about which one can be the most anti-immigrant in 2002, so their positioning actually made them stand out from the rest back then, unlike today.
Then what's the difference between conservative liberals and, well, conservatives?
