Sweden’s right-wing bloc finished three seats ahead of the left in the election of 11 September 2022, according to the Election Authority’s count. Exit polls had said the opposite. They put the Social Democrats and their allies narrowly in front, and for a while that looked like the story.
Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson conceded three days after the vote and resigned the day after that. The preliminary results on 15 September showed the government parties had lost their majority, and final results on 17 September confirmed it.
Who ran, and on what
All 349 Riksdag seats were up. Andersson’s Social Democrats (S) led a left bloc with the Left, Centre and Green parties. Against them stood the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Sweden Democrats (SD). Campaigning ran through July and August, and in late August SD overtook the Moderates in the polls.
The issues were NATO membership, which had become urgent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with crime, energy, the economy and immigration. Andersson’s government had applied with Finland to join NATO on 18 May 2022, despite her party’s long history of opposing it.
The numbers
S took 30 percent of the vote, a net increase, and still lost. SD became the second-largest party with more than 20 percent, ahead of the Moderates at 19. The blocs were separated by about half a percentage point.
The map told it better than the totals. The left won the big cities and several university towns by wide margins: Stockholm by 18 points, Gothenburg by 11. It also flipped two suburban municipalities in Stockholm County. The right answered by taking dozens of municipalities long held by S, especially in the Bergslagen region of the central interior. Dalarna went to the right-leaning coalition for the first time. In Värmland the left survived by 373 votes.
Eskilstuna, Gävle, Norrköping, Södertälje and Västerås, all historic left strongholds, went right. So did Kalmar, Södermanland, Västmanland and Östergötland, which sealed the parliamentary majority. In the north, the right led in eight municipalities, up from none four years earlier.
Where the Sweden Democrats came from
SD had been under a cordon sanitaire from all other parties after winning 62 seats in 2018. The Moderates broke it. After that election’s hung parliament, Ulf Kristersson opened up to SD, and by autumn 2021 the right-wing opposition had an informal agreement on a future Moderate and Christian Democrat government with external support from the Liberals and SD.
The deal was formalised after the vote. A month of negotiations produced the Tidö Agreement among the right-wing bloc, and Kristersson was elected prime minister on 17 October. His cabinet is a minority government of the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals, and it relies on confidence and supply from the Sweden Democrats.
