STOCKHOLM, September 14 — Sweden’s center-left opposition bloc, led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats, is projected to win a parliamentary majority, according to exit polls from Sunday’s election reported by Swedish public broadcaster SVT and carried by the Associated Press. The projection, if borne out by official counts, would clear a path for Andersson to return to office pending coalition talks. The contest pitted Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s center-right coalition against Andersson’s four-party center-left group.
First preliminary official results were expected Sunday evening from election officials.
A Referendum on Normalization
Strategically, the vote was never only about which bloc governs. Hanging over the race is the prospect of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats entering government for the first time — a party that traces its roots to Sweden’s extreme-right fringe and has spent two decades moving steadily toward the center of political power. The arc is documented.
The party first entered parliament in 2010. By 2022, it had become the country’s second-largest party and agreed to support Kristersson’s minority government from outside the cabinet, an arrangement that gave it substantial influence over immigration, crime and other policies without formal responsibility for government departments.
Kristersson now wants to govern as a majority government, and has said the Sweden Democrats would receive ministerial posts if the right wins another term. That transforms the election into a test of the party’s long political normalization — and of whether Swedish voters are prepared to see a party once shunned by almost the entire political establishment exercise executive power. The Sweden Democrats themselves acknowledge that figures involved in their early history had connections to neo-Nazi movements.
For years, Sweden’s established parties maintained what amounted to a political firewall around the party because of those extremist roots.
The Numbers and the Backdrop
The polls are on a knife-edge. An Indikator Opinion poll conducted September 2–10 put the center-left coalition on 50.8%, against 47.6% for the right coalition. The exit polls indicate voters are favoring the center-left opposition.
The race unfolded against a backdrop of right-wing populist parties gaining ground across Europe in recent years amid growing voter backlash over immigration. Sweden has been no exception — yet the exit polls suggest a different verdict here.
Andreas Önnerfors, a professor of intellectual history at Linnaeus University, told CBS News that the campaign’s focus had drifted from substance to personnel. “There has been a shift of focus, which has gone from the true political challenges to who is going to sit in the government,” he said. What this signals will be settled in the count and the coalition talks that follow.
Watch the preliminary official results from election officials, then the arithmetic of Andersson’s four-party grouping — and whether the Sweden Democrats’ long march to executive power stalls at the threshold.
