Liberals

Hmm.

Uh, in 2018, which I believe you have talked about on this show before, um, you had the, uh, the infamous, the, the January agreement between the Social Democrats, the Center Party, and the Liberals, uh, which had the infamous, uh, doorstop clause or doormat clause-

Hmm

... where the government, where the Social Democrats agreed that in order to stay in government and continue to receive the support of the Center Party and the Liberals, they could not negotiate in any way, shape, or form with the left.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

So why did the government parties do better than expected? What went wrong for the two biggest parties on the right and left? And what is Sweden's next government likely to look like? In yet another post-election edition of Sweden in Focus Extra, I spoke to Nicholas Alot, Associate Politics Professor at Södertörn University.

In some ways, the most surprising result of the election is that the three government parties, the moderates, Christian Democrats, and Liberals, all increased their share of the vote compared to twenty twenty-two, while the far-right Sweden Democrats lost three percentage points and, and the left-wing Social Democrats lost two percentage points.

So they both did quite badly.

How do you explain the government party's success?

Um, but how to explain specifically the advance of the government parties, particularly the party of the Prime Minister, after a period in which the Swedish economy has been struggling un-u-until only very recently when it started to, to seem to pick up.

How to explain that is, is difficult.

I mean, individually, you can understand why there was a rush towards the Liberals at the last minute.

It was about, uh, strategic voting to try to keep them in parliament.