Moderata samlingspartiet

And due to that and some other efforts, they also drove crime down.

And the reward for Sweden's Conservative Party in government was they lost the next election, and that's partly due to the demographic change of immigration, 'cause heavily immigrant areas of Sweden were voting overwhelmingly left.

But the other part of it was what we're seeing here, that once they solved an issue, wasn't in voters' minds anymore.

So we need to ask ourselves, this is an existential question, how do we fix this? How do we keep it so our wins are in the public's minds? Or rather, maybe the inverse, you could say, how do we make sure voters are thinking about the fact that things will get really bad again the moment Democrats have the authority to do it? That you might think crime is not an issue now.

The Sweden Democrats are the far-right party.

They are the party that Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister, his moderate party's been working with them over the past four years.

And as you say, they haven't officially been in government, but they've been kind of the kingmakers.

They've been making the political weather because the ruling government have relied on their votes to pass.

Yeah, they were.

They were ...

So they were bigger than, than, than the Conservative Party, uh, the Moderate Party.

And when it comes to them doing so well last time round, how much do you think that was a reflection of the large numbers of asylum seekers, refugees who had sought sanctuary in Sweden in the 2015, 2016 era, where I think 10,000 asylum applications were being made every week? Was it, was it a response, a reaction against that kind of welcome culture that Sweden had at the time?

I think one of the winners was, um, Ulf Kristersson.

He's the outgoing prime minister at the head of the Moderaten, the center-right party, um, because he moved his party up from third to second place, and in doing so, he knocked into third place, uh, the Sweden Democrats, a party we'll probably be talking a lot about.

It's a, a right, far-right nationalist, populist party, choose your term, um, who have been dominating Swedish politics for quite a while, and they had a very bad election night.

They actually lost support for the first time in history since they got into parliament, and, um, this was considered quite significant because they have literally been dictating the tone, the pace, the language of Swedish politics for so long.

Sweden's parliamentary election remains too close to call.

Exit polls gave the left-wing opposition bloc, led by Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson, a narrow lead over the governing right-wing bloc, led by Conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

The two blocks remain neck and neck, but a victory for Kristersson could see the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats enter government for the first time.

[short jingle]