The Moderates clawed back voters as the Sweden Democrats stumbled, while the left’s narrow win left its governing path in knots
By Mihir Sharma / Bloomberg Opinion
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Ulf Kristersson’s Moderates, who have spent four years leading Sweden’s governing coalition, did what voters wanted. The center-right party got growth going: It is expected to be 2.5 percent for this year and next year, remarkable for a European nation. Inflation is 0.3 percent, and — of greater importance to plenty of Swedes — asylum applications this year will be the lowest since 1985. They have even started building nuclear power plants again. And, in gratitude, voters at last week’s national election handed a 176-173 lead to his opponent: a left-wing bloc led by by Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats. Still, that is not the real story here. The Swedish center-right might well have secured its long-term future in this vote. That should comfort them, as well as their beleaguered counterparts elsewhere in Europe. The last government was an unwieldy coalition between the Moderates, who won just 19.1 percent of the vote in 2022, and two smaller center-right parties. It stayed in power thanks to outside support from the far-right Sweden Democrats. Kristersson kept the extremists out of his cabinet, yet they were able to impose many of their priorities on him.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
Happily, as is often the case when a hard-right program is actually implemented, the wavering voter has been repelled. The Sweden Democrats pushed for hardline changes to immigration, including retrospective alterations to citizenship law and the deportations of non-citizens who had been in Sweden for decades. These excesses turned off Swedes, many of whom blamed the far-right and not Kristersson’s government. And so the Moderates’ vote increased to nearer 20 percent, pushing them back in front of the Sweden Democrats. The latter’s share fell by three percentage points — the first time its election support has fallen since the party was founded.
Even the headline “loss” to the left-wing bloc is deceptive. I spent time recently in Hammarby Sjostad in southern Stockholm, an ex-industrial area so beautifully redeveloped over the past couple of decades that it could be a World Heritage Site. Many of its comfortably-off, far-right-hating voters defected to Andersson’s Social Democrats in the most recent election. This time they came back. The Moderates would have done even better if many supporters had not lent their votes to a small center-right party to keep it above the 4 percent threshold needed to stay in parliament. Sweden’s electoral landscape is complicated. Andersson has little to celebrate. The left won more seats, but the Social Democrats had a poor campaign and suffered their worst result in more than a century, also losing three percentage points of the vote. She knew the Greens would work with her, but she also needs support from a centrist and a far-left party. On Monday, she declared “there is currently no possibility” that she could get those two to work together. Her troubles began because many Swedes voted strategically, both for and against parties in her center-left coalition. Backing for the Greens and the Left Party (the far-left outfit) surged in this election, but a cohort of voters also shifted to the Centre Party, because it will only support Andersson if the far-left is kept out of government in the same the way as the Moderates excluded the Sweden Democrats. Obviously that is unacceptable to an ascendant Left Party, which snagged 30 parliamentary seats and reckons it should pick up a few ministerial jobs. This is a familiar dilemma for social-democratic politicians all over Europe, who have struggled with how to cope with the rising popularity of hard-left parties without having to sign up to their policy programs. Andersson does not seem to have any answers for the center-left. But there is another Nordic model that attracts many of them: Denmark’s Social Democrats, who were re-elected in March. Instead of worrying about their left flank, they neutralized the far-right by turning hawkish on migration years ago. Sweden’s Moderates might provide an equivalent blueprint for Europe’s mainstream right. And a necessary one, because if Europe’s center-left has faltered, the center-right has failed outright. The Conservatives in Britain, the Republicans in France and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s flailing Christian Democrats should check out how Kristersson has kept his party afloat. He has governed sensibly, delivering substance where the far-right has offered noise, and he has let extremists shoulder the political costs of their own excesses. The most telling part of all this was how the political conversations I had in Sweden felt strangely normal, even timeless. People argued about private profits in schools or modest differences in tax rates — the stuff of decade-ago elections in the rest of Europe, before migration ate our politics whole. Sadly, Andersson’s failure to unite left and center might allow the Sweden Democrats a way back into the governing picture. It was foolish of Kristersson to promise, when he was trailing in the polls, to give the far-right ministerial posts this time around. But this election shows mainstream conservatives can take the heat out of migration politics in a modern European democracy. They just need to be disciplined — and then deliver. Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.