Swedish election: The right-wing bloc is edging ahead, but the final result may take days
The final result of Sweden’s general election may not be known until Wednesday, according to authorities, as a count too close to call overnight from Sunday to Monday meant advance and overseas ballots had to be counted.
Despite Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats becoming the biggest single party of the night with 30.5 percent of the vote, her progressive left bloc of four parties did not appear to have enough seats in the Riksdag to form a government.
Instead, a block led by the extreme right-wing anti-immigration Sweden Democrats at this stage appears to have a narrow majority of three mandates: with 176 mandates against 173.
The Sweden Democrats are clearly the big winners in this year’s election with almost 21% of the vote, overtaking the traditional conservative opposition, the Moderates, to become the second largest party in the Riksdag.
However, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, has said that he will not become prime minister. Instead, Moderat leader Ulf Kristersson takes that role.
– We are now the second largest party in Sweden and it looks like it will remain that way, said party leader Jimmie Åkesson to his supporters.
“We now know that if there is going to be a shift in power, we will have a central role in it,” he said. “Our ambition is to sit in the government.”
Who are the Sweden Democrats?
The Sweden Democrats party has its roots in the white power and fascist movements of the late 1980s, but now claims to have expelled extremists, as leader Jimmie Åkesson moved to tone down the party’s rhetoric including replacing their original torch logo with a blue flower .
But senior party officials still spoke publicly about the dangers of the ‘Islamisation’ of Swedish society, openly blaming Muslim immigrants for many of Sweden’s social and economic problems – including a crime wave that has seen a spate of shootings and violent attacks, particularly in parts of the country with a large immigrant population.
“Immigration is the reason they exist in the first place,” explained Pontus Odmalm, a Swede who lectures in politics at the University of Edinburgh.
“The anti-immigration message is a given at this point. They want less immigration and more repatriation. But they’ve also shifted the focus to integration failures, and that’s where they tie law and order to immigration,” he told Euronews ahead of time. Sunday’s election.
Magdalena Anderson, Sweden’s first female prime minister, had warned during the election campaign about the rise of the extreme right in Swedish society, noting that they ran as candidates with “racist views and a racist background”.
“A government that would be completely dependent on the Sweden Democrats as the largest party in that government, or as a support to that government, of course, their rhetoric, their way of looking at people could change the way, the way we speak to each. another, how people feel welcome or unwelcome in our society. It could be a different Sweden that we would have in four years, says Anderson.
Regardless of the election outcome, Sweden will likely face a protracted process to form a government, just like after the 2018 election: the parties in whichever bloc emerges as the largest will have negotiated a joint government program that they can all agree on.