“Election Promise: 18-Year-Olds Will Be Allowed to Buy at Systembolaget”
Moderaterna write:
“As an adult you can obtain a driving licence, vote and get married. You can also drink alcohol in bars and restaurants – but not buy a bottle of wine at Systembolaget. That is unreasonable and unfair. Now we want to change that.
“When alcohol consumption among young people has decreased significantly over time and risk consumption in the same group has fallen, this means that the weight of the public health arguments for restrictive measures has weakened. That is also the background to the Moderates having reconsidered their policy.”
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Assessment
The proposal would allow everyone aged 18 to buy beer, wine and fortified wine – everything below 22% alcohol – at Systembolaget, the Swedish alcohol retail monopoly, where the age limit today is 20. The Moderate Party points to Norway and Finland, where 18-year-olds can buy beverages below the same threshold, and promises that the effects of the change would be evaluated. The push lands two weeks before the general election on September 13.
Alcohol use among young Swedes has declined under the very system the party now proposes to worsen. The age limit and the state-run retail monopoly are core parts of the common sense alcohol availability policy limits that helped produce the decline – a generational shift Systembolaget itself made the message of its recent campaign.
The Moderate Party turns that success into the argument for removing the protection: the policies have worked, so the policies are supposedly no longer needed. No other field of public health is treated this way – a decline in traffic deaths is not a reason to remove seat belts.
The push also comes from within a governing coalition that trails the centre-left opposition in the polls two weeks before the election. The Moderates are seemingly making a bid for young voters in a campaign that struggles mightily to reach them. But with this latest push, the party reveals how out of step they are with a generation concerned with their health, the future of the planet, employment opportunities, and staying alcohol-free much longer.
The research on age limits points the other way, as a Movendi International analysis of three natural experiments shows:
- Finland – one of the Moderate party’s supposed model countries – lowered its alcohol age limit from 21 to 18 in 1969; those who gained access at 18 carried higher alcohol-attributable illness and death for decades.
- Sweden’s strong beer experiment of 1967–68 made strong beer available to 16-year-olds in two regions. It was stopped after eight and a half months, when police, schools and social services reported sharp increases in youth alcohol use and intoxication – and the exposed cohorts still had higher rates of alcohol-related disability more than 40 years later.
- In the US, states that held the age limit at 21 have the lowest alcohol-attributable injury mortality in adulthood.
The Moderate Party’s claim that increasing availability of beer and wine would foster “a healthier alcohol culture” is the same as the 1960s thinking that led to the strong beer experiment and was proven flawed. Their claim also ignores the reality that young Swedes are rejecting the alcohol norm (what the Moderates call “alcohol culture”) and instead prefer healtheir social norms and environments – something the Moderates-led government failed to make investments in over four years.
The election push fits a pattern in current Swedish alcohol policy: the government lowered alcohol taxes, parliament approved alcohol “farm sales” in April 2025, and the government removed the food requirement for alcohol service based on false Finnish data. The current government is now at risk of losing the election. They have engaged in step-by-step changes to erode a successful alcohol policy system Swedes support: for example, Systembolaget ranks among the country’s most trusted institutions.
Sweden votes on September 13.