Tight Swedish Election Puts Liberal Traditions Under Growing Pressure
Sweden’s national election came down to a virtual dead heat on Sunday, with a partial count showing the opposition center-left bloc, led by Social Democrats leader Magdalena Andersson, narrowly ahead with a projected 175 seats in the 349-seat Riksdag, just one more than the right-wing governing bloc under Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.
The count, based on ballots from 4,853 of Sweden’s 6,312 election districts, leaves the outcome genuinely uncertain, with a final result possibly days away once overseas ballots are tallied. While the vote isn’t expected to shift Sweden’s broadly pro-Western, pro-Ukraine foreign policy, it will determine whether Kristersson’s push toward tougher migration rules continues, or whether the country pulls back from that direction.
The race has been unusually charged because Kristersson broke with longstanding political convention ahead of the vote, pledging to bring the far-right Sweden Democrats into government as part of a push for a majority right-wing coalition. Supporters on the right argue that approach has helped reduce gang violence and sharply cut immigration. Others see it differently, viewing the move as crossing a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.
Foreign Affairs Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, a member of Kristersson’s Moderate Party, said it looked like it would be a long night, with full results possibly not arriving until midweek once ballots cast abroad are counted. Kristersson had trailed in opinion polls through most of his four years in office but closed the gap in the campaign’s final stretch as support for Andersson’s Social Democrats softened.
Critics of the government argue its immigration policies, which combine incentives and penalties meant to push migrants toward closer cultural assimilation or departure, have come at a cost to civil liberties. A strong showing for the Sweden Democrats would also be seen as a boost for Europe’s broader far-right movement, which gained momentum last week after Alternative for Germany’s win in a state election, and which is eyeing further gains across the continent, including next year’s French presidential race.
The stakes were on display Saturday in Rinkeby, a Stockholm suburb with a large Swedish-Somali population, where Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Akesson remarked that the area doesn’t look like Sweden. The country was long known as one of Europe’s most welcoming toward immigrants before Kristersson took office four years ago and began rolling back permanent residency for refugees, tightening welfare eligibility and increasing deportations. The Sweden Democrats, whose origins trace back to neo-Nazi and white supremacist roots in the 1980s, say they have since purged extremists from their ranks and apologized for that history.
At the party’s election night gathering, cheers erupted as an updated projection from broadcaster SVT showed the race far tighter than an earlier exit poll that had put the center-left ahead with 51 percent of the vote. Ludvig Aspling, a Sweden Democrats lawmaker and the party’s immigration spokesperson, admitted the nerves were intense, saying it felt like his life’s work hung in the balance, but that the race remained close enough to still win.
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