After four years in office, Sweden’s right-wing government appears to have lost its parliamentary majority in Sunday’s election. The count is not yet complete, and the centre-left opposition leads by just over 30,000 votes. As of writing, the red-green parties hold 176 seats versus 173 for the right-wing bloc. Late postal votes and ballots from Swedes living abroad are being counted this week. One seat may still change hands, although few expect the balance to change.
The government made a mistake by allowing citizenship applications to continue under the old rules while the new and much stricter citizenship law was being prepared
Even so, it is far from certain that the left-wing Social Democrats will be able to form a new government. Sweden’s multi-party system means they need support from a socialist party with communist roots, a radical Green party and a market-liberal former agrarian party whose relations with the socialist party are, at best, frosty.
The narrow margin also means that, even if Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson wins a parliamentary vote to become prime minister, her majority will be fragile. Sweden was in a similar position two parliamentary terms ago, when political instability repeatedly brought down the government.
But the Social Democrats do have one advantage: they have proved that they are willing to do almost whatever it takes to find the votes they need. Faced with a similar situation during the 2018-2022 parliamentary term, Andersson won the support of an independent former Left party MP after agreeing to closer ties with the Kurdish PYD in northern Syria.
Still, there is a possibility that the present prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, could remain in office if the old agrarian party can be persuaded either to support him or simply abstain. A fresh election cannot be ruled out either.
Whatever happens next, the election has already revealed two things: how immigration is reshaping Swedish politics, and how the traditional right can win back voters from populists.
At the 2022 election, around 15 per cent of eligible voters were foreign-born. This year, the figure is estimated at around 18 per cent. Turnout also rose in several immigrant-heavy districts while falling slightly across the country as a whole. In an election decided by only a few tens of thousands of votes, that matters.
Swedish public service television conducted a large exit poll. It showed a clear left-wing lead among voters of non-European background: seven in ten backed one of the opposition parties.
A poll by the respected Novus institute before the election found that of Muslim respondents, around 80 per cent intended to vote for either the Social Democrats or the Left party.
In some districts with large immigrant populations, the results are striking. For example, in Rosengård Centrum in Malmö, the Social Democrats and Left party together received, according to the preliminary count, 95.2 per cent of the vote – a result that might have made Saddam Hussein jealous.
This pattern predates the present government. Therefore, it cannot be explained simply as a reaction to the government’s more restrictive approach to immigration, such as tighter family-migration rules, tougher enforcement of deportation orders and much stricter requirements for citizenship. Nor can it be explained simply by the left’s mobilisation of pro-Palestinian voters.
Support for the left was similarly strong in immigrant areas between 2006 and 2014, when Sweden had a centre-right government and pursued one of the most liberal immigration policies in Europe.
But immigration did not simply hand the left a larger electorate. It also pushed other voters to the right. The idea that Sweden would have had an overwhelming right-wing majority without mass immigration is probably too simple. Without immigration, many working-class voters who moved away from the Social Democrats might instead have stayed with them. The electoral effect of immigration therefore runs in both directions.
What can be said is that the government made a mistake by allowing citizenship applications to continue under the old rules while the new and much stricter citizenship law was being prepared. I argued at the time for a moratorium on citizenship while the new rules were being implemented.
During the last parliamentary term, around 200,000 people were given citizenship under rules that imposed very few demands on applicants – not even a requirement to speak or write Swedish. The majority of those granted citizenship were from outside Europe. The final result has not yet been confirmed, but with only around 30,000 votes between the two sides, such demographic changes can plainly matter.
Immigration to Sweden has not only brought crime, social problems and unemployment – now the government that was successfully starting to solve these problems has been voted out because of immigration itself.
For Britain’s traditional right, the second lesson is more encouraging. The right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats, lost ground for the first time since entering parliament, falling from 20.5 to around 17.6 per cent. The Moderates moved in the opposite direction, rising to 19.9 per cent and reclaiming their position as Sweden’s second-largest party.
And the Sweden Democrats lost voters while much of their political agenda was being implemented. They have had considerable influence over the government, but the Moderate party has essentially adopted the same line as them on immigration and crime. In practice, it was a Moderate-led government that turned much of that agenda into policy.
Despite losing votes on Sunday, the issues that drove the Sweden Democrats’ rise remain firmly on the political agenda. But the voters seem to have concluded that the Moderate party can be trusted to keep immigration low and to do what it takes to fight crime. A century-old party with experience of government also offers something a protest party finds harder to provide: the ability to govern. That still seems to count for something.
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