For years, no other Swedish party would sit in a room with the Sweden Democrats. That wall, a cordon sanitaire applied by everyone else to what they called an anti-immigration or far-right party, held through the 2018 election, when the Sweden Democrats won 62 seats. It did not hold much longer.
That 2018 vote produced a hung parliament. Neither the Red-Greens nor the centre-right Alliance had enough seats to govern. Ulf Kristersson of the Moderates, who had ruled out working with the Sweden Democrats when he took over his party in 2017, was given the first go at forming a government and opened the door to them. The Centre Party and the Liberals refused to back him. Stefan Löfven, the Social Democrat, tried next and failed too. He finally got back in on 18 January 2019 through a deal across five parties.
Four years of drift
Kristersson met the Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson in December 2019 and said he would cooperate with the party in the Riksdag. Ann-Cathrine Jungar of Södertörn University said this put Sweden in line with several other European countries where centre-right and radical-right parties work together. By autumn 2021 the right-wing opposition, meaning the Moderates, Sweden Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberals, had an informal agreement on a future Moderate and Christian Democrat government under Kristersson, with the Liberals and Sweden Democrats giving outside support.
The left had its own turbulence. Löfven’s government fell in a no-confidence vote on 21 June 2021 and was re-established on 7 July. A month later he said he would step down. Magdalena Andersson, a former finance minister, replaced him as party leader and was elected prime minister on 24 November 2021. She lasted seven hours. The Green Party pulled out of her government after the opposition’s budget passed instead of hers, and she resigned. On 29 November she was re-elected, 101 votes to 75 abstentions, with a cabinet of Social Democrats alone.
NATO and the vote
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshaped the campaign. Andersson’s government applied with Finland to join NATO on 18 May 2022, a reversal for a party with a long record of opposing the alliance. Crime, energy, the economy and immigration crowded in alongside it. By late August the Sweden Democrats had passed the Moderates in the polls, and exit polls on election day gave the Social Democrats and their allies a narrow lead.
The count turned that around. Sweden’s Election Authority said the right bloc had overtaken the left by three seats, and the Sweden Democrats finished second with more than 20 percent, ahead of the Moderates at 19. Andersson conceded three days later. After a month of talks and the Tidö Agreement among the right-wing parties, Kristersson became prime minister on 17 October, leading a minority government that depends on the Sweden Democrats for support.
