Voters in Sweden will go to the polls on Sunday in a contest that will decide if the conservative government stays in power, potentially granting a hard-right party its first cabinet seats, or if the centre-left will regain control. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is bidding for a second four-year term leading the European Union country, which recently became NATO’s newest member. His predecessor is attempting to reclaim office, with the battle over leadership largely overshadowing core policy debates.
More than eight million people, from a total population of around 10.6 million, are registered to vote for the 349-seat parliament in Stockholm, the Riksdag, which will subsequently select the nation's next prime minister. Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relies on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party that has far-right roots but has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority.
If the right is re-elected, it can expect Cabinet posts this time. He's up against Magdalena Andersson of the center-left Social Democrats, a party that more often than not led Swedish governments since World War II. Andersson served as prime minister from 2021 until she lost power at the last election.
Experts say the campaign has been fragmented and incoherent, with policy questions such as how health care should be organized drowned out by the question of which parties will be able to put together a government. So these topics are not really what people discuss," said Zeth Isaksson, a sociologist in electoral behavior at Stockholm University. "People discuss who is going to be in government, and that’s what the election is about.” There are two major political blocs: one with four parties on the right and another with four parties on the left.
So the big question is not so much which party wins as which side can put together a majority. Individual parties need a minimum 4% of the vote to win parliamentary seats. On the face of it, “it would be a sensation if the opposition parties, having been ahead in the opinion polls pretty much for four years since the last election, didn’t now win a majority,” said Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University.
But he said that an “extremely defensive” campaign by the Social Democrats may have cost them some support, leaving some voters wondering why they should support the party. The right-wing bloc's hope of convincing voters that it's more united than its rivals may have had “a little impact,” he added. One significant thing is different in this election.
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