Sweden heads to the polls on Sunday in an election that could mark a watershed moment for the northern European nation and NATO's newest member. Across Europe, right-wing populist parties have gained ground in recent years amid growing voter backlash over immigration, and Sweden has been no exception. The election pits Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's center-right coalition against a center-left bloc led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats.
But hanging over the race is the prospect of Sweden's right-wing populist Sweden Democrats entering government for the first time. The party, which traces its roots to Sweden's extreme-right fringe, has spent the past two decades moving steadily toward the center of political power. It first entered parliament in 2010.
By 2022, it became the country's second-largest party and agreed to support Kristersson's minority government from outside the cabinet. The arrangement gave the party substantial influence over immigration, crime and other policies without formal responsibility for government departments. But now Kristersson wants to govern as a majority government and has gone one step further, saying the Sweden Democrats would receive ministerial posts if the right wins another term.
This has transformed the election into a test of the Sweden Democrats' long political normalization and whether Swedish voters are prepared to see a party once shunned by almost the entire political establishment now exercise executive power. "There has been a shift of focus, which has gone from the true political challenges to who is going to sit in the government," Andreas Önnerfors, a professor of intellectual history at Linnaeus University, told CBS News. The polls are currently on a knife-edge, with an Indikator Opinion poll conducted Sept. 2–10 putting the center-left coalition on 50.8%, against 47.6% for the right coalition.
For years, Sweden's established parties maintained what amounted to a political firewall around the Sweden Democrats because of the party's extremist roots. As recently as 2018, Kristersson assured Holocaust survivor Hédi Fried that he would not cooperate with the party, according to . The Sweden Democrats themselves acknowledge that figures involved in their early history had connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements.
But under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led the party since 2005, the Sweden Democrats have sought to expel extremists, moderate their image and present themselves as a mainstream right-wing party, with policies including deporting people who are in the country illegally, toughening citizenship laws, requiring strict assimilation of newcomers and restricting social security to citizens. Part of the party's success has come from combining positions traditionally associated with the political right with policies aimed at working-class voters. "They have merged typical right-wing positions with typical Labour or Social Democratic positions — social security and benefits and things like that.
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