Do we like them?

Do we like Björn Ulvaeus?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with a thinner record on trans issues specifically and one old tax stoush he won.

Björn Ulvaeus is the songwriter half of ABBA's engine room, the bloke who helped turn Swedish pop into a global habit. These days he's still the band's chief spokesman, doing interviews about its legacy and where it fits in the world.

On the harm check, the record is clean. In a February 2026 Attitude interview he talked about ABBA's gay following, saying it happened gradually and that the band was grateful and happy about it. We found nothing from him on trans rights either way, so that part is a gap, not a tick.

He's also been vocal about democracy. In April 2025 he told The Telegraph that free speech is in danger and that, with autocrats on the rise, Europe needs to step up and unite. He was promoting a democracy education programme for schools at the time.

When Donald Trump's campaign used ABBA songs at rallies in 2024, the group's side pushed back and Universal moved to have the footage taken down. Ulvaeus told ITV News that clearer laws on political use of music were needed. We only saw search listings for those two pieces, not the full articles, so treat the detail lightly.

The closest thing to a scandal is old. Swedish tax authorities argued that contracts moving his song royalties into companies were shams and that the money was really his. He appealed, and in 2008 a Swedish court approved the appeal, leaving him with Skr85m in tax-free income. That's a dispute he won, not a conviction.

Nothing new on him lately that we could verify; plenty of clickbait sites claim otherwise, and we've ignored them. The rest of the good-stuff list (UNICEF links, donations) turned up only in search listings we couldn't open, so we've left it out of the file.