It took a few days to be sure, but we have a result in Sweden. With only a handful of postal and overseas votes to be counted, the four-party left-of-centre opposition (Social Democrats, Left, Greens and Centre) is about 40,000 votes ahead of the right-of-centre incumbents, 49.5% to 48.9%. That will give them in aggregate a three seat majority, 176 to 173. (See official results here.)
It’s one of the paradoxes of our time that while the political scene gives the impression of great change and unpredictability, underlying voter behavior in many places is extremely stable. I’ve noted before the way in which the last few presidential elections in the United States have shown historically low swings, quite contrary to the impression you’d get from the media. Sweden is a similar story: this is the third election running where the gap between the two main alliances has been less than a percentage point.*
The final seat is very close between the Left Party and the main centre-right party, the Moderates; at times during the count it looked as if it would come out at 175-174. That evenness gives more power to the smaller parties, so that, as I explained in last week’s preview, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the left-of-centre parties will form government together. So far the Left is insisting on having some ministerial positions, which the Centre describes as unacceptable; if neither is willing to compromise then there could be a search for other solutions.
In principle it would be possible to poach the Liberals and Christian Democrats (41 seats between them) from the government coalition to replace the Left’s thirty seats, producing a more centrist government not unlike that in Denmark. Alternatively, a grand coalition between Social Democrats and Moderates would have 169 seats, needing only one minor party to take it to a majority. But none of the players sound especially keen on either option.
The real story in the election is not the small shift between the two main blocs but the larger shift to the left within each. Among the governing parties, the far-right Sweden Democrats lost ground – down three percentage points and eleven seats – while the other three (Moderates, Liberals and Christian Democrats) all made modest gains. Meanwhile the Left and the Greens picked up support at the expense of the Social Democrats, whose 28.0% was their worst result since 1908.
But even those changes are relatively minor: most Swedes seem happy to stick with their existing parties. Turnout was a healthy 84.3%, also pretty much unchanged from 2022. And some of those voters were even able to vote in IKEA stores! It’s what Nina Hillenberg, whose account makes a fascinating read, describes as “a form of symbiosis: IKEA borrows credibility from ‘Swedishness’ to sell furniture, while the government borrows IKEA’s global reach and warmth to sell the country.”
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* Although the identity of the alliances changed between 2018 and 2022: the Centre switched from right to left, and the far right, which had previously stood apart, joined the right-of-centre group.
The World is Not Enough 