Sweden’s future is balanced on a knife-edge as the country awaits a final tally of the votes in Sunday’s general election, in which a loose bloc of rightwing parties led by the far-right Sweden Democrats – now the second largest party – holds the slimmest of majorities.
With 95% of the vote counted, the right bloc was on 49.7%, while four parties on the left, including the incumbent Social Democrats, stood at 49%. The final picture will come on Wednesday after the votes of Swedish citizens living abroad and those of some who voted early are counted.
The vote translates into a majority of just one seat in parliament for the rightwing parties, and in the last election, in 2018, three seats changed hands at the final count. Evidence from past elections showed no pattern in how these late votes may influence the outcome, a researcher told thelocal.se, while the liberal daily Dagens Nyheter said its analysis suggested the right bloc had a “good chance” of maintaining its lead.
Sweden’s political mainstream contemplated the apparent failure of their strategy to adopt the Sweden Democrats’ (SD) positions on crime and immigration in an attempt to win back voters from the far right.
Parties that had to varying degrees embraced cooperation with the far right all experienced a fall in support: the centre-right Moderate party saw its vote slip to 19.1%, the Christian Democrats and Liberals also lost share, while the SD vote grew by three points to 20.6% – the ninth election in a row that the party has expanded its share of the vote.
“The Moderates party did not believe voters would stay with the SD if the Moderates shifted rightwards on immigration and crime,” said Mikael Gilljam, a politics professor at Gothenburg University. “But it turned out that voters wanted the real thing rather than ‘SD lite’.”
Swedes received a startling reminder of the SD’s anti-liberal traditions immediately after the election when one of its best-known figures, Rebecka Fallenkvist, was filmed at a Sunday night election party repeatedly giving a salute similar to the Nazi “sieg heil”. The party’s press secretary said Fallenkvist was drunk and “it came out wrong”.
The Moderate party leader, Ulf Kristersson, a potential prime minister, spent Monday afternoon meeting other party leaders in the rightwing bloc. But they maintained a discreet silence in the face of the uncertainty over the final election outcome. The SD leader, Jimmie Åkesson, said: “We ate lunch. I have nothing more to say.”
However, leading SD figures hinted at the coming clash with their bloc partners in the event of negotiations to form a government, insisting on higher social security benefits in the face of Moderate party promises to cut taxes.
“We have been incredibly clear that we will be the social conscience of a bourgeois government, with unemployment and sickness benefits as important flagships for us,” said Aron Emilsson, the SD’s foreign policy spokesperson.
The SD’s new status as the largest party on the right puts it in a strong position to win concessions, although the other three parties in the bloc have all said they will not allow the far right to take ministerial positions. The small Liberal party remains divided over working with the SD. It would take only one MP to break ranks for a rightwing government to fall, Gilljam said.
Political leaders on the centre left also bear some responsibility for the success of the SD, according to Christer Mattsson, a leading researcher into rightwing extremism at the University of Gothenburg, concerned that politicians have abandoned their principles on immigration and anti-racism in an effort to remain in power.
Voters were indifferent to the SD’s authoritarian nationalist politics and its historical roots in the Nazi movement, he said, and instead attracted to its message that the economic benefits of globalisation should be enjoyed by the indigenous Swedish population rather than shared with impoverished migrants.
“Opinion surveys show that Swedes are in favour of economic globalisation,” he said. “But they want to give the bill for it to someone else.”
