Aiming Higher
The municipality of Lund consists of a unique medieval city rich in cultural heritage, quaint surrounding towns and villages, and rich agricultural landscape. Lund has a top-notch university, many international companies and research facilities that attract students, researchers and professionals from all around the world. Here we have an atmosphere of openness and tolerance, and an environment where ideas and knowledge thrive.
But given our advantages, Lund can be even better! The Liberal Party will always be a strong advocate for education, personal responsibility, and allow experience and ambitions to pay off.
In our Lund every person should be able to shape their own life as they wish, in order to make their dreams come true.
Our Top 5 Priorities
A top-notch education system focused on knowledge and quality
A better integration policy focused on jobs and the Swedish language
A better elderly care with less loneliness and malnutrition
A business friendly Lund where ideas are allowed to grow and develop
A safer Lund with more visible police officers and more measures against criminality, both preemptive and reactive.
Sweden's Only Truly Pro-European Party
The Liberal Party is Sweden's only truly pro-European party; we are the only party that wants Sweden to be fully integrated within the European Union, including adopting the euro as our currency. We strongly support the right for people to travel, study, work, and retire freely within Europe.
In addition, we believe that trade and exchange across borders, also outside of Europe, are necessities for our economic growth and welfare. Many of our challenges today, like global warming, transnational crime and terrorism, can only be properly addressed at the European, or even global, level.
Many political parties in Sweden, just as in the rest of Europe, are of the opinion that the EU has just the right amount of influence as it is. Some even are of the opinion that cooperation within Europe and EU influence should decrease. Our position is that there can never be too much cooperation. The fact that climate change is still ongoing, and that Russia and its likes by means of aggression, coercion and violence once again are trying to change international borders and rules, suggest more cooperation is needed – not the opposite.
The EU is the answer on how to tackle issues that span across borders. And there should be more of it. That is our stance.
This is Liberalism
The foundation of liberalism is the belief in a person's ability to make their own life choices. But also that it is a goal in itself for people to have agency and liberty. Therefore we liberals focus on individual freedom and responsibilities. With our policies, we seek to tear down obstacles and create possibilities in people's daily lives – and not to decide how people are supposed to live their own lives.
Typical liberal values comprise democracy, human rights, equality, freedom of expression, property rights and market economy. For us, these are universal values that apply everywhere. Therefore we react strongly to injustice, independent of whether it happens in Lund or on the other side of the planet.
In our world, it should pay off to take responsibility; to study and to work. But we also have a responsibility for each other. When facing life challenges, there must be help and support from society. But the primary task of society is to help people to get back on their own feet again, and not have them stuck in lifelong welfare dependency.
Although Liberalism draws its roots from thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Anders Chydenius, we are also inspired by contemporary political leaders like Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau. While we are strong supporters of market economy and entrepreneurship, we also believe that society should help and support people in need. We thus believe in a social market economy based on social liberalism.
The Future Starts in the Classroom
The freedom to build and shape your own life starts with knowledge. Knowledge tears down barriers, opens up new paths of life and strengthens the individual's ability to make his or her own decisions in life. That is why the Liberal Party works so stubbornly for better schools. We want every child, irrespective of background, to grow and develop in the Swedish school system. An equal education system of high quality is the best investment a society can make.
A good education system justifies generous funding. The Liberal Party has always prioritized education in the budget of the municipality. This priority will be even more important in the future due to the large number of children of asylum seekers that have recently arrived to Lund and who also need a school that works for them.
An Integration Policy that Creates Possibilities and Makes Demands
A job, self-sufficiency, and knowledge in the Swedish language are key to integration into the Swedish society. Inactivity and welfare dependency must decrease. It is also important that all welfare benefits are linked to participation in various measures, like education or internships.
We want all asylum seekers that come to Lund to get information about the Swedish society, their rights and duties, democratic values, and equality.
Our EU Policy in a Nutshell
Overall policies
• Sweden should adopt the Euro as our currency
• The EU should have more influence and facilitate more cooperation. International issues are best solved together, not separately.
Climate policy
• More cooperation to tackle climate change. The polluter should take the bill – create a European tax on greenhouse-gases
• A plan for the closure of all coal power in Europe
• End all subsidies for fossil fuels
• Increase climate assistance to emerging and developing economies. New climate-neutral power generation outside Europe is an investment in the future.
• Store CO2. Decreasing emissions of greenhouse gasses is not enough. EU needs to collect and store CO2 from the atmosphere. So called Carbon Capture.
• Easier and greener travel throughout Europe. It should be easier, faster and cheaper to choose the climate friendly means of travel, rather than as of today, when it often is the opposite.
Growth and jobs
• Decrease the bureaucracy burden for companies.
• Skills and competences should be acknowledged in all of EU. It should not be necessary with months- or even yearlong processes to get previous educations, skills and competences validated when moving within EU.
• More free trade. Free trade is the greatest recipe discovered by humanity for increasing economic means for all participants. The EU should negotiate more free trade agreements with the rest of the world.
• Strategic investments should be thoroughly investigated. We cannot allow states with a completely different set of international ambitions and goals to get hold of critical European infrastructure, whether intellectual or physical. Nordstream is just one example of such investments that should go through thorough scrutiny before approval. Smoother rules for the digital economy.
Migration
• A common, shared migration policy where all member states share the responsibilities. Up until today, a small number of EU states have taken a disproportionate responsibility for asylum seekers from outside the EU. Equal distribution of responsibility is needed.
• Increase support and assistance to people in close proximity to areas where there is conflict or other reasons that cause refugees. NGOs and other actors nearby should have better means to help on the spot, so that migration to other parts of the world might become unnecessary.
• Common consular support outside EU. If you are in need of consular support while anywhere in the world outside of EU – you should be able to get that help and support from any embassy or consulate belonging to any of the member states.
• The EU should be open for membership of new states, such as Ukraine and Serbia, whenever prerequisite conditions are met.
Safer and securer EU
• A European FBI. To combat pan-european criminal networks and other organized crime such as terrorism, we need more cooperation. The EU should have a common law-enforcing agency and police that can freely travel throughout Europe and that have jurisdiction everywhere – without the delay of bureaucracy.
• The EU needs a common witness protection programme.
• Better laws to combat human trafficking.
This is our EU policy in a nutshell. We have a lot more policies than this, of course. You can find the rest of our EU-policy here (Swedish)
Political Program for Lund 2022-2026
In our political program Leading Lund with our hearts and our minds, you find all the details about our policies until 2026.
Enjoy Life. All Life Long.
One of the fundamental foundations of liberalism is to see every person as an individual, and not as a representative of a group. We fight for the right of every person to have power over their own life choices.
Therefore we want society to support those who need a bit more help in life. For example, our senior citizens should have more freedom to decide the type of elderly care they need. We also defend the right for disabled people to have an assistant. In our Lund, everyone, irrespective of age, background or disabilities, should be able to live a free and independent life of high quality.
A City where Ideas and Innovations Thrive
Research and innovations are the foundation of a developing society. Throughout the years, many pioneering innovations have been developed in Lund, including the modern respirator, the medical ultrasound, the artificial kidney, and bluetooth.
The university is the foundation for research in Lund. The new supermodern facilities MAX IV and ESS also open up new possibilities. Together with Sweden's oldest research park for high-tech entrepreneurship - Ideon Science Park - Lund has unique possibilities to attract researchers and entrepreneurs from all around the world.
We want to take advantage of these possibilities and continue the development of Lund as a Nordic center for research and innovation - the Nordic version of Silicon Valley.
Freedom is also to Feel Safe where You Live
The rule of law is one of the cornerstones of a liberal society. Because as long as you have to be afraid, you cannot be free.
Prevention is the most important work to counteract criminality. This requires a sound policy for jobs, education and integration.
But there is also a need for a well-functioning justice system that guarantees that make things right when they have gone wrong. Therefore we want more police officers, and we want them to be more visible in public. Until the government has fixed this, we want the municipality to hire its own security guards, to be employed at specific places, like the train station area.
