The Swedish Centre Party. The Poor Relation of the Family?

The Centre Party has a strong organisational tradition and frequently refers to itself and its affiliated organisations as the 'Centre movement'. Moreover, despite significant variations in electoral support, the party has been the second biggest membership party in Sweden for most of the postwar period. For many years, the Centre Party did not see itself as ideological at all and often referred to ideologies in derogatory terms. Since then, the party's publications have contained claims to a specific Centre ideology consisting of three main elements: decentralism, environmentalism and market liberalism. There have also been attempts to trace this ideology back to the formation of the party. The Nordic Centre Party family has been far from united on the question of European integration. From the early 1960s to the late 1990s, the party supported the policy of the Social Democratic government that the Swedish policy of non-alignment and neutrality was incompatible with full European Community membership.