Sweden opposition holds narrow lead as government talks drag on

Sweden’s left-leaning opposition parties held a narrow lead in preliminary election results reported Monday, with nearly 95% of districts counted. The four opposition parties were heading for 176 seats in the 349-seat parliament, the Riksdag, while the four parties making up or supporting the outgoing conservative-led government were headed for 173 seats.

The outcome may not be clear until early votes, including overseas ballots that didn’t reach polling stations by Election Day, are counted Wednesday.

Former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s center-left Social Democrats were set to finish as the biggest single party despite losing some support. Andersson hopes to win back the job she lost in 2022.

Current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said “if all the red lines remain in place, then Sweden won’t have a government at all,” according to public broadcaster SVT. He added that he intends to “explore a number of possibilities that may exist.”

Mikael Damberg, a prominent Social Democrat, said “all parties will have to do some giving and taking, and we will do that too,” according to Swedish news agency TT.

Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relied on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party with far-right roots that has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority.

The Sweden Democrats’ performance was disappointing. Preliminary results showed their support slipping to just under 18%, down about 3 percentage points from four years ago. They fell behind Kristersson’s Moderates to land in third place.

“In Sweden, there has been a tradition of quite rapid government formations, but for the last 10 years they have turned more complicated, and this will be the case this year as well,” said Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a political science professor at Södertörn University.

Some of the difficulty stems from the Center Party, which has aligned with the left because it doesn’t want to govern with the Sweden Democrats but also doesn’t want to go into government with the Left Party.

Any combinations across the traditional right-left division would also be complicated. Andersson’s Social Democrats were on course for about 28% of the vote.

The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by people who had been active in right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazis. They toned down their rhetoric and expelled openly racist members under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led them since 2005.

Jungar noted that when right-wing populist parties enter or support governments, “they tend to lose votes … because voters get disappointed if they don’t get all their policies through.” She said the Sweden Democrats have a stable electoral base, and “their electoral result will go up and down, and that’s part of the normalization of these populist radical right parties in Sweden as elsewhere.”

Whoever forms the government, there are unlikely to be “any major changes in terms of going back to more liberal migration policies,” Jungar said, after populist right-wing parties helped influence more restrictive policies across the Nordic region over the past two decades.