Tomorrow, Ebba Busch will give a speech at the party’s municipal days in Örebro. She does so after a period of setbacks both internally and externally. Here are her four biggest challenges right now. 1. Unrest in the organization This manifests itself in several ways – but an important issue in some quarters is that the party is losing among free churchgoers. The election analysis states that one in five churchgoers has been lost, and this worries kd leaders in districts that are strongly liberal, such as Jönköping and Örebro. In those districts, it is now openly discussed that it is the party’s “harder” line that repels the party’s core voters, and it is done in a way that is unusual in politics. And it’s a criticism that could spill over to the party leader, who is intimately associated with that line. At the same time, the party is without a party secretary and my sources in the party say that there has been an information vacuum in this situation which is not good. The challenge here is to quickly find a party secretary with strong roots in the country. 2. Falling public opinion numbers KD has been continuously declining since the election and also had a poor election result. This creates a bad atmosphere in most parties, although the Christian Democrats are somewhat more vaccinated than others because they are used to strong declines between elections. 3. Leadership that is questioned Ebba Busch has received criticism for her leadership in connection with the very open conflict between the EU parliamentarian Sara Skyttedal and the now resigned party secretary Johan Ingerö. After Skyttedal’s now closed police report against Ingerö for molestation, the KD leader made a series of harsh statements where she tried to balance between supporting Skyttedal’s version of what happened and keeping order in her party. But the effect has become unclear and what has happened has quickly shown how difficult it is to be party leader and minister at the same time. 4. Government concerns The electricity subsidy, the electricity subsidy, the electricity subsidy. As minister, Ebba Busch has received harsh criticism for broken election promises and delayed payments to companies. At the same time, the government’s important issue of allowing farm sales of wine has stuck with another deputy minister, Social Affairs Minister Jakob Forssmed, who is now ducking all questions on the subject following indications that a decision to allow farm sales could lead to Sweden needing give up the alcohol monopoly.
t4-general