In Sweden, the left has won, “but it’s like celebrating the toss of a coin”

While the right in Sweden is in tears, the left is not laughing. Yet it is rejoicing and has been called upon to form a government amidst a virtual electoral deadlock. The verdict at the polls for the Riksdag elections once again reveals a country split down the middle: voting took place on Sunday, but the final results were only confirmed on Thursday – proof that the count went right down to the very last ballot paper. Thus, Ulf Kristersson, the Conservative Prime Minister, eventually resigned. Meanwhile, Magda Andersson, the leader of the opposition, has taken up the baton, declaring that “the Swedish people have voted for a new direction, for unity and against internal divisions”. The remark almost sounds like a wish directed at the centre-left coalition itself, given the diversity of the forces involved: the narrow majority in Parliament – 176 seats to 173 – will require a level of unity that, on paper, looks rather complex. And according to experts, in any case, it is only the government that is changing in Sweden. Not the electorate.

“Today, just as four years ago, the result is very close – closer than the polls had predicted on the eve of the election,” explains Olle Folke, Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University. “Forming a stable government will be a difficult task. The opposition won by a margin of 0.5 per cent – 50,000 votes – but we see no difference in terms of electoral trends: there have been shifts within the coalitions, moving a few percentage points here and there, but to speak of a turning point for the country would be an interpretation not supported by the data”. In other words, “elections in Sweden essentially continue to function like a coin toss: last time it favoured the right, today the left. But the two blocs remain numerically unchanged.”

Yet each political camp tends to promote the narrative that best serves its own ends. The outgoing government points the finger at the extremely broad Stockholm coalition, which ranges from former communists to liberal centrists – but in turn relies on an equally broad spectrum, from former neo-Nazis to other liberals. Andersson and his colleagues, on the other hand, overestimate the significance of a modest gain: it was the first time the centre-right had opened the coalition’s doors to extremists, taking a major risk, and all things considered, the experiment held up. Indeed, the constituency-by-constituency electoral map shows that the progressive front lost two seats compared with the previous election – a matter of detail, once again. The issue of ‘record’ turnout is also misleading, because in Sweden it has always been very high, even in recent years: today over 85 per cent, in 2022 84.2 per cent, and in 2018 over 87 per cent.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the losers – or rather, the non-winners? – of these elections are the two parties that had been tipped as potential frontrunners: Jimmie Akesson’s Sweden Democrats, that is, the anti-establishment right, and the Social Democrats led by the prime minister-designate Andersson. They lost eleven and eight seats respectively. The former are paying the price for backtracking on certain identity-related issues – toning down their rhetoric on anti-Semitism and related matters, a necessary step to fully join the coalition – and have seen a drop in support for the first time since the party’s foundation in the late 1980s. They have also been overtaken in terms of total votes by Kristersson’s Moderates, who, like all the other centre-right parties, are on the rise. The same has happened on the centre-left, at the expense of the Social Democrats. They remain the country’s largest party, but their influence at the helm of the Riksdag has been scaled back thanks to the combined push from all the others: the Greens, the Left and the Centre Party. If this shift in votes is to be traded off against the controversial – and largely unpopular – aspects of the government’s programme, it will not be an easy parliamentary term. For anyone.