Oct 1, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min · 15 segments
Back from our summer break, our co-hosts Gabriel Hedengren (@ghedengren) and Javid Ibad (@javidibad) go over key developments over the past few months across Europe, featuring local elections…
So we thought we'd start, though, with the Swedish general elections that took place on the 13th of September, as Sweden elects for their national parliament, their regional parliaments, and their local municipal governments all at once on the same day, so that has now taken place.
Just as we were recording this today, the final official count has been concluded, and the results are among the closest in modern Swedish history.
The four opposition parties led by the Social Democrats have finished at 49.6% of the vote against the four governing parties on the right who ended up with 48.8%, resulting in 176 versus 173 seats in parliament and a two-seat majority, which is, funnily enough, just a reversal of what the elections in 2022 gave.
So it's essentially equally close election, but it's gone from favoring the coalition led by the Moderate Party to the coalition led by the Social Democrats.
Sweden uses a nationwide proportional representation system with a 4% threshold, so that's how the seats have been allocated.
The incumbent, incumbent government that is no more was built on the Tidö Agreement of 2022, under which the Moderates, who are center right, sitting with the European People's Party, alongside the Swedish Christian Democrat Party and the Liberals, who are in Renew.
They governed in a coalition with support from the populist right wing, far right Sweden Democrats, who stayed outside of cabinet in a sort of supply-side agreement in parliament.
The opposition to that government is not a formal coalition, but four very different parties who now are tasked with finding a way of ruling Sweden.
So that's the Social Democrats, who sit with the center-left Social Democrats in Brussels as well, led by Magdalena Andersson, who is most likely to become prime minister.
The Center Party sitting with the left-leaning bloc is relatively recent development now, although it's been going-- [chuckles] it's the result of a process over the last decade or so.
As I said, they're an agrarian liberal party that, for the most of the 2000s, governed with the center right but has ended up supporting the Social Democratic-led government as they refuse any formal agreements with the Sweden Democrats.
So as a lot of you will know, there's been that split between the two traditional liberal parties in Sweden, with the liberals deciding to join these agreements with the Sweden Democrats, whereas the Center Party has refused and instead now is figuring out how to govern more to the left.
It was a really interesting campaign leading up to this result, and we'll go through that in a bit more detail, too.
It was very sort of scattered and focused on the future government formation questions as well as tactical voting concerns, particularly tied to the threshold.
It's worth noting that for pe-people that follow Europe Elects coverage and the polls that we put out regularly, polling in Sweden for the last few years have indicated a very comfortable, stable lead for the central left opposition bloc.
Essentially from one month after the last election until July, really August, there was a very comfortable lead, you know, sometimes up to 10 percentage points, and that just completely then shifted during the election campaign, leading instead to this very narrow victory.
A lot of people claim that that's to do with the Social Democrats' approach.
They ran a pretty sort of neutralizing, incompetency-focused campaign, trying to sort of hedge and not take too much of a big political stance to hold together this anti-conservative coalition.
However, this, in the end, backfired on their own results, with them bleeding voters both to their left and their right in the end.
In terms of the major dividing lines between the two blocs, a lot of it has to do with migration, where the opposition channeled a lot of frustration in Sweden regarding harsher deportation policies implemented by the previous government, especially what's been sort of known as teenage deportations, children of immigrants who, at the time they turn 18, don't have the legal status transferred to them and then therefore end up being deported.
That was then fixed, and I won't go into too much detail about it, but that was a big issue where the four parties that are now forming a government really stood up for those 18-year-olds, accusing the previous government of being too harsh on migration.
The other one where there is consensus within the winning coalition is climate, where the previous government really focused on getting fuel prices down at the expense of, obviously, then emissions, which is something that the opposition criticized them for also using pretty similar attack lines.
So we thought we'd start, though, with the Swedish general elections that took place on the 13th of September, as Sweden elects for their national parliament, their regional parliaments, and their local municipal governments all at once on the same day, so that has now taken place.
Just as we were recording this today, the final official count has been concluded, and the results are among the closest in modern Swedish history.
The four opposition parties led by the Social Democrats have finished at 49.6% of the vote against the four governing parties on the right who ended up with 48.8%, resulting in 176 versus 173 seats in parliament and a two-seat majority, which is, funnily enough, just a reversal of what the elections in 2022 gave.
So it's essentially equally close election, but it's gone from favoring the coalition led by the Moderate Party to the coalition led by the Social Democrats.
Sweden uses a nationwide proportional representation system with a 4% threshold, so that's how the seats have been allocated.
The incumbent, incumbent government that is no more was built on the Tidö Agreement of 2022, under which the Moderates, who are center right, sitting with the European People's Party, alongside the Swedish Christian Democrat Party and the Liberals, who are in Renew.
They governed in a coalition with support from the populist right wing, far right Sweden Democrats, who stayed outside of cabinet in a sort of supply-side agreement in parliament.
The opposition to that government is not a formal coalition, but four very different parties who now are tasked with finding a way of ruling Sweden.
So that's the Social Democrats, who sit with the center-left Social Democrats in Brussels as well, led by Magdalena Andersson, who is most likely to become prime minister.
The Center Party sitting with the left-leaning bloc is relatively recent development now, although it's been going-- [chuckles] it's the result of a process over the last decade or so.
As I said, they're an agrarian liberal party that, for the most of the 2000s, governed with the center right but has ended up supporting the Social Democratic-led government as they refuse any formal agreements with the Sweden Democrats.
So as a lot of you will know, there's been that split between the two traditional liberal parties in Sweden, with the liberals deciding to join these agreements with the Sweden Democrats, whereas the Center Party has refused and instead now is figuring out how to govern more to the left.
It was a really interesting campaign leading up to this result, and we'll go through that in a bit more detail, too.
It was very sort of scattered and focused on the future government formation questions as well as tactical voting concerns, particularly tied to the threshold.
It's worth noting that for pe-people that follow Europe Elects coverage and the polls that we put out regularly, polling in Sweden for the last few years have indicated a very comfortable, stable lead for the central left opposition bloc.
Essentially from one month after the last election until July, really August, there was a very comfortable lead, you know, sometimes up to 10 percentage points, and that just completely then shifted during the election campaign, leading instead to this very narrow victory.
A lot of people claim that that's to do with the Social Democrats' approach.
They ran a pretty sort of neutralizing, incompetency-focused campaign, trying to sort of hedge and not take too much of a big political stance to hold together this anti-conservative coalition.
However, this, in the end, backfired on their own results, with them bleeding voters both to their left and their right in the end.
In terms of the major dividing lines between the two blocs, a lot of it has to do with migration, where the opposition channeled a lot of frustration in Sweden regarding harsher deportation policies implemented by the previous government, especially what's been sort of known as teenage deportations, children of immigrants who, at the time they turn 18, don't have the legal status transferred to them and then therefore end up being deported.
That was then fixed, and I won't go into too much detail about it, but that was a big issue where the four parties that are now forming a government really stood up for those 18-year-olds, accusing the previous government of being too harsh on migration.
The other one where there is consensus within the winning coalition is climate, where the previous government really focused on getting fuel prices down at the expense of, obviously, then emissions, which is something that the opposition criticized them for also using pretty similar attack lines.
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