Independent parliament member Elsa Widding says Swedish politics has become a “chamber of lies,” where party discipline, EU directives, and a harsh cancellation culture prevent real debate.
In an interview with Aga Wilson, she described why she founded Ambition Sweden and what she wants voters at home and abroad to hear:
Sweden must reclaim sovereignty, stop sending young people into wars they did not choose, and allow questions that the established parties treat as forbidden.
Widding was selected by the Sweden Democrats in 2022 to work on the climate policy, but left the party in May 2023. She remained in parliament as an independent, a position she says is the only reason she has been able to confront ministers on vaccines, the war in Ukraine, defense strategy and climate policy.
Party members, she told Wilson, are not free to raise sensitive issues. Leadership must approve the line first. A colleague from a right-wing party told her he had been allowed one or two debates in three and a half years, and none on anything controversial.
That constraint, she argues, is why she started a new party.
“It’s a big challenge to start a new party in Sweden,” she said, “although I would say it’s kind of an advantage for me since I’m in the parliament already and since I am the only parliamentarian who is actually debating a lot of very sensitive issues with different ministers.”
She has held multiple debates with the defense minister and says she is the only member systematically questioning the government’s strategy within Swedish Politics.
Her core message is national security without adventurism. Ambition Sweden, she said, stands for Swedish security and good relations with the United States, China and Russia.
“We don’t want to see our young people coming home in a body bag… and we don’t want them to be killed.”
She pointed to a recent vote that, in her account, allows the government to send Swedish soldiers to war without asking parliament. She also argued that continued military aid to Ukraine ignores Ukrainian public opinion.
Citing a July 2025 Gallup finding that only 24 percent of Ukrainians wanted the war to continue, she asked why Sweden should send more money and arms “killing even more Ukrainians.” The war, she said, should be ended immediately.
Swedish Politics – BRICS and Moscow
Widding described democracy in Sweden as hollowed out from two directions. Inside the Riksdag, committees of 17 people can lock in decisions, including more money for the Ukraine war, that the remaining 322 members never vote on in any meaningful way. Everything also arrives pre-cooked from Brussels.
“We are constantly every week voting for new legislations or new directives,” she said. “No one can really question anything.”
Leaving the EU while keeping trade agreements is, in her view, the precondition for solving energy, climate and food-security problems. She called the alternative “the Davos mafia” and said Sweden cannot remain a small country that is afraid of BRICS or of talking to Moscow.
The second threat she named is censorship and cancellation. After she attended a conference in Stavanger on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, two ministers demanded she apologize. Colleagues were warned not to join her debates. A speaker of parliament who thanked her after an empty chamber session was, she said, removed by security, taken to a police station, and later convicted of “disturbing the democracy” for those words.
Mainstream media, she added, largely ignored her questions on vaccine risks and the war. Supporters, including doctors and nurses, have traveled from northern Sweden and gathered outside the Riksdag. That, she said, gives people “some hope that there is at least some truth in this… chamber of lies.”
On climate and energy, her professional field, Widding said she has spent thousands of hours working with specialists on IPCC assessment reports. Positions she took two or three years ago now appear in business magazines. She opposes large-scale wind projects she says destroy West Coast fisheries while the government simultaneously prepares for war and “take[s] the food away from the citizens.”
Ambition Sweden, founded in 2025 after dropping its earlier name (Sweden First), is built around issue committees staffed by people she describes as knowledgeable rather than ideological. The party needs 4 percent of the vote to enter the Riksdag in 2026. Widding’s strategy is grassroots reach into villages, especially among the roughly 16 percent who did not vote last time, plus advertising.
Cancellation culture, she said, is the main obstacle: many potential donors and members are afraid their names will become public.
Her appeal is aimed both at Swedes who feel the country they grew up in has changed and at outsiders watching a Nordic democracy they once regarded as a model. The people, she insists, are no longer in charge. Party loyalty and the EU process decide first. “We cannot solve anything in Sweden unless we become a sovereign country.” Until then, she intends to keep asking the questions others will not.
Interview by Aga Wilson (AgaWilsonShow.com) | Production and photo by T. Sassersson, NewsVoice | # Swedish Politics