Sweden election: Right-wing bloc edges ahead, but final result could take days

The final results of Sweden’s general election might not be known until Wednesday, according to authorities, as a too-close-to-call count overnight from Sunday into Monday meant advance votes and overseas ballots will all need to be tallied. 

Although Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats emerged the biggest single party of the night with 30.5% of the vote, her progressive left-wing bloc of four parties did not appear to have enough seats in the Riksdag to form a government. 

Instead, a bloc lead by the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats looks at this stage to have a slender one-seat majority.

The Sweden Democrats are clearly the big winners of this year’s election polling almost 21% of the votes and  overtaking the traditional conservative opposition the Moderates to become the second biggest party in parliament. 

However the Sweden Democrats’ leader Jimmie Åkesson has said he will not be prime minister. Instead Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson will take that role. 

“We are now the second biggest party in Sweden and it looks it’s going to stay that way,” party leader Jimmie Akesson told his supporters.

“We know now that if there’s going to be a shift in power, we will be having a central role in that,” he said. “Our ambition is to be 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 says it has now expelled extremists, as leader Jimmie Åkesson moved to tone down the part’s rhetoric including replacing their original torch logo with a blue flower. 

However, senior party officials were still talking in public on the campaign trail about the dangers of ‘Islamisation’ in Swedish society, and openly blamed 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 by now. They want less immigration and more repatriation. But they’ve also shifted the focus to integration failures, and that’s where they tie in law and order to immigration,” he told Euronews ahead of Sunday’s election.

Magdalena Anderson, Sweden’s first female prime minister, had warned during the election campaign about the rise of the far-right in Swedish society, noting that they stood candidates with “racist opinions and racist backgrounds.” 

“A government that would be fully dependent on the Sweden Democrats as the biggest party in that government, or as a support to that government, of course, their rhetoric, their way of seeing on people could change the way, how we speak to each other, how people feel welcome or unwelcome in our society.It could be a different Sweden that we would have in four years,” Anderson said.  

Regardless of the election outcome, Sweden is likely to face a lengthy process to form a government, as it did after the 2018 election: the parties in whichever bloc emerges the largest will have negotiate a common government programme they can all agree on.

Sweden election: Right-wing bloc edges ahead, but final result could take days
Source: Reporters View PH