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Sweden’s election could mark major milestone for Europe’s populist right

2026-09-11 10:55:15 EDT / CBS News

By Sweden heads to the polls on Sunday in an election that could mark a watershed moment for the northern European nation and NATO’s newest member. Across Europe, right-wing populist parties have gained ground in recent years amid growing voter backlash over immigration, and Sweden has been no exception.

The election pits Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s center-right coalition against a center-left bloc led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats. But hanging over the race is the prospect of Sweden’s right-wing populist Sweden Democrats entering government for the first time.

The party, which traces its roots to Sweden’s extreme-right fringe, has spent the past two decades moving steadily toward the center of political power. It first entered parliament in 2010. By 2022, it became the country’s second-largest party and agreed to support Kristersson’s minority government from outside the cabinet. The arrangement gave the party substantial influence over immigration, crime and other policies without formal responsibility for government departments. But now Kristersson wants to govern as a majority government and has gone one step further, saying the Sweden Democrats would receive ministerial posts if the right wins another term.

This has transformed the election into a test of the Sweden Democrats’ long political normalization and whether Swedish voters are prepared to see a party once shunned by almost the entire political establishment now exercise executive power.

“There has been a shift of focus, which has gone from the true political challenges to who is going to sit in the government,” Andreas Önnerfors, a professor of intellectual history at Linnaeus University, told CBS News.

The polls are currently on a knife-edge, with an Indikator Opinion poll conducted Sept. 2–10 putting the center-left coalition on 50.8%, against 47.6% for the right coalition.

From fringe to mainstream

For years, Sweden’s established parties maintained what amounted to a political firewall around the Sweden Democrats because of the party’s extremist roots. As recently as 2018, Kristersson assured Holocaust survivor Hédi Fried that he would not cooperate with the party, according to Reuters. The Sweden Democrats themselves acknowledge that figures involved in their early history had connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements.

Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, delivers a speech in Solvesborg, Sweden. Nichlas Pollier / Bloomberg via Getty Images

But under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led the party since 2005, the Sweden Democrats have sought to expel extremists, moderate their image and present themselves as a mainstream right-wing party, with policies including deporting people who are in the country illegally, toughening citizenship laws, requiring strict assimilation of newcomers and restricting social security to citizens.

Part of the party’s success has come from combining positions traditionally associated with the political right with policies aimed at working-class voters.

“They have merged typical right-wing positions with typical Labour or Social Democratic positions — social security and benefits and things like that. That makes sense among ordinary people,” Önnerfors said.

Immigration and crime as key voter concerns

The Sweden Democrats helped make tougher immigration and crime policies central to Swedish politics. Still, their durability is also rooted in profound changes in Swedish society and voters’ perceptions.

“Swedish politics has clearly moved in a more restrictive direction on issues such as immigration and crime,” Professor Niklas Bolin, a political scientist at Mid Sweden University, told CBS News. “Importantly, this shift is not limited to the parties on the right. The Social Democrats, Sweden’s largest party, have also moved in this direction.”

Sweden received around 163,000 asylum applications during the 2015 European migration crisis; with a population just shy of 11 million, it was among the highest per-capita rates in Europe. In subsequent years, integration, segregation and a surge in gang shootings and bombings became major national political issues. The country’s approach to immigration has since changed dramatically.

The Swedish government says asylum immigration has fallen to its lowest level since 1985.

Government policies on crime have also led gang violence to recede. Police figures show shootings falling from 391 in 2022 to 158 in 2025, with the decline continuing this year. But the political consequences of the violence and the wider debate over immigration and integration have endured.

“The Sweden Democrats have built a stable electoral base,” Bolin said.

“Immigration and dissatisfaction with integration remain important explanations, but their support is also linked to concerns about crime and a broader dissatisfaction with established parties.”

Their support, he added, is “particularly strong among men, working-class voters and voters outside the larger cities.”

For a country that for generations has prided itself on low crime, a generous welfare state and liberal attitudes toward immigration, equality and individual rights, Sunday’s election marks an important moment — testing how far Sweden’s politics have shifted, and whether a party once kept at the margins is now ready to enter the heart of government.