Sweden’s frequent elections may result in an extreme right-wing government
At the time of writing, 95 percent of the votes from Sweden’s election on September 11 have been counted. On current figures, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s center Social Democrats consolidate their first place and rise 2.2 points to 30.5 percent (with particularly strong increases in Stockholm). But according to Sweden’s proportional election, the composition of the government does not primarily depend on which party comes first, but on the relative strength of the left and right blocs.
The country is facing a so-called Whale Russian; literally an “election thriller”, or in more idiomatic English a “nail biter”. Currently, the right-wing bloc is poised to take 175 seats in the Riksdag to the left-wing bloc’s 174 seats. It is not thanks to Ulf Kristersson’s centrist Moderates, traditionally the leading force in the right-wing bloc, but to Jimmie Åkesson’s far-right Sweden Democrats, who jumped into second place with 20.6 percent of the vote.
The final results won’t come until mid-week, with overseas votes and some other final postal votes to be counted from Wednesday (September 14). But according to broadsheet calculations Today’s news, the “Wednesday vote” in previous elections has tended to slightly increase the number for the Moderates and the center-left Greens, and decrease it for the Social Democrats and the Sweden Democrats (a reflection of the sociological composition of Sweden’s foreign voters). Applying this pattern to the current result, the paper’s analysis shows, a mandate would switch from the left bloc to the right bloc.
This indicates that Kristersson has a greater chance of forming a majority. Before the election, the Moderates ruled out bringing the Sweden Democrats into a coalition, but it is now up to Kristersson to confirm that this remains their position even though the far right is the biggest force in his bloc. The far-right party claims their results entitle them to a discussion about cabinet seats. If the Moderates resist, the most likely outcome is a minority coalition of the other right-wing parties (the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals), with outside support from the Sweden Democrats.
Even short of a full coalition, it would be a historic shift for Sweden – a country known for its long decades of social democratic dominance and a left-liberal international image. That image has always been justified to some extent, but it also never fully reflected the complexity of Swedish society, and more reactionary aspects. The Sweden Democrats have roots in the white nationalist, fascist and neo-Nazi scenes in Sweden. Despite moves to detoxify its image, its policies remain openly anti-immigrant and advocate a hard-line, authoritarian approach to law and order, including the deportation of all foreigners convicted of a crime. The rise of violent crime in recent years has fueled the party’s rise.
For many years, any form of collaboration with the Sweden Democrats was taboo. In 2015, Fredrik Reinfeldt, the then leader of the Moderates and Prime Minister, called the party’s leaders “racists and rigidly xenophobic”. In 2018, I reported from Hässleholm, a town near Malmö in southern Sweden, where the local Moderates had relied on support from the far-right party to oust a center-left municipal council. That too had caused a national scandal. Nevertheless, just four years later, the Sweden Democrats are on the verge of becoming kingmakers for the country’s national government.
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Sunday’s election results are reminiscent of Austria’s election in 1999. Then a social democratic party also came first. Then the far-right centre-right also jumped into second place. Then the third center party (in this case Wolfgang Schüssel’s People’s Party) broke with the old cordon sanitaire and used the support of the political extremists (in this case Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party) to oust the incumbent centre-left – albeit by bringing it into a full coalition. The big difference between then and now is the wider European context. In early 2000, when the Schüssel-Haider government came to power, there was outrage across the continent and the rest of the EU imposed diplomatic sanctions against Vienna. But since then the rise of the hardline across Europe has made such a distinction impossible. Parties somewhat comparable to the Sweden Democrats have formed coalition governments or support relations with incumbent governments in Italy, Austria (again) and Norway. Hard right parties rule in Poland and Hungary. Marine Le Pen received 41.5 percent of the vote in the second round of the French presidential election in April.
The transformation has taken place as much within mainstream parties, and especially mainstream centre-right parties such as the Moderates, as within the far-right parties themselves. In Spain, the conservative Partido Popular formed a regional coalition with the far-right Vox party in April – quite possibly a model for a national governing coalition after next year’s general election. Center-right parties in countries such as France and Britain have adopted policies (such as Brexit or the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda) that would once have been confined to the right-wing. Even in Germany, there cordon sanitaire remains comparatively robust for obvious historical reasons, there have been flirtations at state level between the Christian Democrats and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Further evidence of these trends is likely to come next week when, on September 25, Italians vote in a general election. Fratelli d’Italia, a party which, like the Sweden Democrats, has fascist roots, is currently leading the opinion polls and has a good chance of forming a three-party government with the far-right Lega and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia.
Examples from most European countries – with the arguable exception of Britain, where the first-past-the-post electoral system tends to internalize the major party shifts that occur elsewhere between parties – suggest that this lowering of cordon sanitaire often strengthens the current far-right parties rather than diluting their electoral power. This is certainly the case in Sweden, where the Moderates’ opportunistic decision shortly after the Hässleholm plenipotentiary pact to move to the right and open up cooperation with the Sweden Democrats has clearly backfired: early analysis of Sunday’s results indicates that 14 percent of those who voted for the Sweden Democrats had backed the Moderates at last election in 2018.
Sweden has a long history of being an exception within Europe: from the long political hegemony of the social democrats to its independent resistance to covid-19 lockdowns. Once, the prospect of a Swedish government dependent on the Sweden Democrats had been another exceptional case. But in today’s Europe it is unfortunately quite typical.
[See also: Magdalena Andersson and Sanna Marin’s fight against far right misogyny]