The Liberals have saved themselves in the Riksdag - but at the price of their liberalism

The Liberals have entered the Riksdag, with a never-before-tried strategy: to go to the election on the basis of other parties' policies.

It must be said: The Liberals' election spurt has surprised. With Jimmie Åkesson as election worker, "support sausages" and a message that L was needed for a Tidö victory, Simona Mohamsson collected enough votes to get over the barrier.

It started with the hug. A press conference where Simona Mohamsson presented herself as the guarantor of SD ministers, and announced that they had a "community of values" in matters such as migration policy. "Now my old friends rule the party - and kill liberalism", I noted then. The message was that liberal values ​​are not best served by giving power to a party whose goal is a closed world.

My fear was that L would find it difficult to set limits for what is acceptable by tying himself so tightly to the Sweden Democrats.

During the election campaign, that fear has been realized.

In July, SD's migration policy spokesperson, Ludvig Aspling, said that Sweden has too few ethnic Swedes. Mohamsson continued to explain that if you want SD politics, you should vote for L.

Expo recently revealed yet another Russian friend in the party. We are the guarantor of SD ministers, said the Liberals.

In the final debates, Jimmie Åkesson questioned the legitimacy of Muslims voting in Sweden and suggested that immigrant children do not belong in classrooms. For L, it seems to have passed as nothing.

To explain this away as a political game born out of desperation is to make it too easy for oneself.

The party has changed enormously quickly recently.

Large parts of the Liberals' former members and high-ranking representatives have left the party because of the right-wing trend. The party leaders seem happy to get rid of them.

At the same time, the liberal watchdog has started barking in another direction: against the kind of liberals who do not consider the nationalist swing, deportations and hatred to be the right way.

At the beginning of September, Simona Mohamsson wrote, on DN Debatt, that liberals like Bengt Westerberg, one of her representatives at the post, and the former C leader Annie Lööf are for red on the inside. Socialists, one may assume.

A couple of days ago, Climate and Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari visited the Youtube channel Studio 3, and claimed that Bengt Westerberg and the Center Party were not liberal - just "red-green".

The last term began with the Liberals going against large parts of the L policy that the party's members voted for. Now the Liberals have been elected to the support basket mandate to give the Sweden Democrats more power to implement their vision. Those who reason as Mohamsson did just a few years ago are not even considered liberals.

L has secured his seat in the Riksdag. The People's Party they once were, however, no longer exists.