Sweden’s left bloc edges ahead in tight election as far-right support slips
With the left only narrowly in front, Swedes will now face days of negociations over who will run their hospitals, schools and migration system as fragile alliances and bitter rivalries collide in coalition talks.
Just a few weeks ago, the contest appeared almost decided. The centre-left bloc led by the Social Democrats of former prime minister Magdalena Andersson held a lead of around ten percentage points in the polls.
However, the situation changed a few days before the election, when polls began pointing to a much narrower gap and suggested that the government led by the centre-right Moderate Party of incumbent prime minister Ulf Kristersson could retain its mandate.
At around 2:30AM, preliminary results gave the opposition parties three more parliamentary seats than the governing bloc. At that point, 6,177 of 6,626 electoral districts had been counted.
Given the complex coalition arrangements, it remains uncertain whether Andersson’s Social Democrats will have enough MPs to form a government once all votes have been counted.
The Associated Press wrote that the Scandinavian country faced several days of uncertainty until all ballots were counted. The election result may only become clear on Wednesday, when local election commissions count advance votes, including ballots cast abroad.
One of the most important questions of the Swedish election was the performance of the populist, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats.
Before the election, there had been speculation that the party with neo-Nazi roots could, for the first time in Swedish history, become part of a governing coalition and secure key ministerial posts.
“Supporters of this party felt that it was doing what it had promised,” said Mats Braun, a Swedish political scientist at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. “At the same time, its main issues, crime and migration, were no longer important enough in the election debates for the party to gain more voters from them.”
Ultimately, according to preliminary results, they won 17.6 percent of the vote, lower than their vote share four years ago, falling to third place behind Kristersson’s Moderates.
Although the Sweden Democrats had remained outside Kristersson’s government, they had significant influence over policy, particularly on migration and crime. While their position outside government had allowed them to influence government policy on the one hand and criticise it on the other, party leader Jimmie Åkesson wanted more.
Before the election, he said that the existing model of cooperation had come to an end and promised that, if his party won the election, the Sweden Democrats would have to become a fully fledged part of the government. He also said they should secure several ministries, including justice, defence, foreign affairs or finance.
Kristersson said in April that, if his bloc won, he was prepared to form a majority government with the Sweden Democrats, some of whose founding members had espoused neo-Nazism and ideas of white racial superiority. This was also why the main parties had previously regarded cooperation with the Sweden Democrats as unacceptable, ignored the party and excluded it from coalitions.
However, this changed over the past few years, as the Sweden Democrats sought to cleanse the party, rid it of its most radical members and gradually enter the political mainstream. Last year, for example, they apologised for their antisemitic and racist past.
Denisa Ballová is a reporter in the foreign affairs desk of Denník N based in France. She studied journalism and political science at Comenius University in Bratislava, previously worked at SME, later studied journalism in Aix-en-Provence and lived in Paris. She also lived in Estonia for two years.
