Sweden’s election has produced a change of government, but the politician most responsible for changing Swedish politics may not become prime minister.
After an extraordinarily close count, the bloc of right-wing parties finished with 176 of the 349 seats in parliament, compared with 173 for the parties supporting the left. Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson conceded on Wednesday, clearing the way for Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson to attempt to form a government. Andersson’s Social Democrats actually increased their vote and remain comfortably Sweden’s largest party, receiving just over 30%.
The more significant result lies elsewhere. The Sweden Democrats received 20.54% of the vote and won 73 seats, overtaking Kristersson’s Moderates and becoming the second-largest party in the Swedish parliament. A political movement that other major parties spent years attempting to isolate is now larger than every Swedish party except the Social Democrats.
That creates a problem much more complicated than whether Sweden has simply “moved right”.
The Sweden Democrats have roots in Sweden’s far-right and extremist political milieu. Since Jimmie Åkesson became leader in 2005, the party has spent years attempting to distance itself from those origins, expelling extremists, moderating parts of its image and presenting itself increasingly as a nationalist, anti-immigration and socially conservative democratic party. Critics argue that extremist currents remain significant and that the party’s transformation should not erase its history. Supporters argue that the Sweden Democrats now participate through ordinary elections and represent legitimate concerns that established parties ignored for too long.
For much of the party’s rise, Sweden’s other major parties effectively constructed a cordon sanitaire around it. They could disagree bitterly with one another while sharing an assumption that cooperation with the Sweden Democrats should remain outside normal coalition politics.
That strategy is easiest to sustain when the excluded party is small.
At 5%, mainstream parties can plausibly isolate it while forming governments through everyone else.
At 10%, exclusion becomes more difficult.
At 20%, the arithmetic begins changing the principle.
One in five Swedish voters has now supported the Sweden Democrats.
That does not automatically make every Sweden Democrat policy legitimate. Democratic politics is not a mechanism through which popularity transforms every idea into an acceptable one. Majorities can support policies that violate minority rights, constitutional principles or liberal norms.
But democratic politics also cannot treat a large and persistent section of the electorate as though its preferences simply do not exist.
This is the dilemma of political exclusion.
A cordon sanitaire can protect democratic institutions by preventing anti-democratic movements from acquiring power.
It can also create an anti-establishment feedback loop if voters conclude that established parties will cooperate with almost anyone except the party they support.
The excluded movement then receives an extraordinarily powerful argument: the political establishment claims to believe in democracy until you vote for us.
That narrative can strengthen precisely the party the cordon was designed to weaken.
This does not mean Sweden’s established parties were necessarily wrong to isolate the Sweden Democrats previously. Political parties have a right to refuse coalitions with organisations whose values they consider incompatible with their own. Democracy requires parties to respect election results; it does not require them to form governments with everyone who wins seats.
Coalition choice is itself political choice.
The problem is that exclusion needs a theory of change.
What is supposed to happen to the excluded party?
Does it disappear?
Does its electorate return to mainstream parties?
Does the party moderate enough to become acceptable?
Or is it expected to remain permanently outside government regardless of how many votes it receives?
The first two outcomes clearly have not occurred in Sweden.
The third is now being tested.
The Sweden Democrats have spent years attempting to normalise themselves. The centre-right has gradually moved from complete exclusion towards accepting some degree of cooperation.
This creates an uncomfortable question: can political exclusion encourage moderation?
Perhaps.
If a party knows that entering government requires removing extremists, accepting democratic rules and making itself coalition-compatible, exclusion creates incentives for institutionalisation. The reward for moderation is access to power.
But this mechanism works only if the threshold is real.
If mainstream parties tell a movement that nothing it changes will ever make cooperation possible, the incentive to moderate disappears.
A cordon sanitaire therefore works best as a conditional boundary rather than a permanent caste system.
Certain behaviour is incompatible with cooperation.
Change the behaviour and the political relationship can change.
That is different from saying certain voters or political identities are permanently illegitimate.
This distinction becomes particularly important in Sweden because the Sweden Democrats’ growth did not occur in an ideological vacuum. Immigration, integration, violent crime and national identity have become increasingly important political issues.
Sweden accepted exceptionally large numbers of refugees relative to its population during the European migration crisis, particularly in 2015. Supporters saw the policy as consistent with humanitarian obligations and Sweden’s liberal international identity. Critics argued that the scale of migration placed pressure on integration systems, housing, schools and social cohesion.
For years, mainstream political discussion sometimes treated strong criticism of immigration policy as morally suspect.
That may have created political space for the one party willing to make immigration central to its identity.
This is a recurring democratic mechanism.
If established parties refuse to discuss an issue because they dislike the way it is framed, the issue does not necessarily disappear.
The voters concerned about it may move towards parties willing to discuss it much more aggressively.
Mainstream avoidance can therefore produce ideological monopoly.
The Sweden Democrats became associated almost completely with restrictive immigration policy because other parties initially occupied less of that political space.
As the issue became more electorally important, mainstream parties gradually changed their own positions.
This demonstrates how challenger parties can influence policy without governing.
A party’s success is not measured only through cabinet seats.
It can change what other parties consider politically possible.
The Sweden Democrats have already done that.
Swedish immigration politics today is considerably more restrictive than it was a decade ago, and several mainstream parties now use language or support policies they would previously have avoided.
This is what political scientists sometimes describe as agenda-setting power.
If I force you to campaign on my issue, I have changed politics even if you defeat me.
That kind of power can be more durable than one election victory because it changes the axis along which voters evaluate everyone.
Climate parties can do this with environmental policy.
Populist parties can do it with immigration.
Anti-corruption movements can do it with institutional reform.
Small parties can therefore exert influence disproportionate to their parliamentary size by changing which questions large parties are required to answer.
The Sweden Democrats are no longer small.
That creates a new stage.
Once a challenger becomes the second-largest party, it cannot rely indefinitely on being the outsider pointing towards problems. It begins facing responsibility for solutions.
That transition can expose contradictions.
Restricting immigration is a policy objective.
Integrating people already living in Sweden is a different problem.
Reducing gang violence requires policing, criminal justice, education, labour-market integration and social policy.
Protecting a welfare state while populations age creates fiscal constraints.
National identity cannot substitute for administrative policy.
This is where populist movements often encounter the same challenge as protest movements: identifying failure is easier than governing the system producing it.
The Sweden Democrats may now gain enough influence that voters can evaluate their actual policy competence rather than merely their critique.
That could strengthen them.
It could also expose them.
Political inclusion therefore does not necessarily mean political endorsement.
Sometimes allowing a challenger closer to responsibility is the mechanism through which democratic accountability becomes possible.
A permanently excluded party can blame every problem on the establishment because it never controls policy.
A party supporting government has to explain outcomes.
This is another argument against treating exclusion as automatically safer.
Political responsibility can moderate behaviour because responsibility creates trade-offs that campaigning avoids.
But the risk runs in the opposite direction too. A party can use institutional access to weaken the very democratic safeguards that allowed it to enter.
Hungary demonstrates how electoral legitimacy can coexist with gradual erosion of liberal constraints. Winning elections does not give governments permission to undermine judicial independence, media pluralism or minority rights.
This is why democracy and liberalism should be distinguished.
Democracy answers who receives political authority through elections.
Liberal constitutionalism places limits on what electoral winners can do with that authority.
A party can be democratically popular and illiberal.
The appropriate response is therefore not simply excluding every illiberal party indefinitely.
It is maintaining institutions strong enough that whoever wins remains constrained by constitutional rules.
Courts matter.
Independent media matters.
Civil-service professionalism matters.
Opposition rights matter.
Coalition partners matter.
If democratic institutions depend entirely on keeping one particular party outside government, the institutions themselves may not be sufficiently robust.
That is a more demanding approach than the cordon sanitaire because it requires confidence that the constitutional system can survive political outcomes establishment parties dislike.
At the same time, institutional confidence should not become complacency. Parties with histories of extremism deserve scrutiny precisely because political normalisation can make people forget where movements came from.
The correct approach is neither permanent guilt by historical association nor deliberate historical amnesia.
Political organisations can change.
The burden is demonstrating that change through behaviour.
Do candidates respect minority rights?
Do leaders condemn extremist members consistently?
Do they accept election defeats?
Do they respect independent courts?
Do they distinguish criticism of immigration policy from hostility towards immigrants as people?
Those are better measures of democratic compatibility than whether a party’s branding has become more polished.
The Sweden Democrats should therefore be judged according to what they do with their growing influence, not simply what they call themselves.
The Moderates face an equally important test.
Ulf Kristersson wants to become prime minister, but his own party won fewer votes and seats than the Sweden Democrats. This creates an unusual coalition relationship in which the likely head of government leads a smaller party than one of the principal forces supporting the right-wing bloc.
Again, parliamentary power does not map neatly onto vote share.
The Sweden Democrats may possess substantial bargaining leverage without formally leading the government.
That arrangement could benefit both sides.
Kristersson receives enough parliamentary support to govern.
The Sweden Democrats receive influence without assuming complete executive responsibility.
It could also create accountability problems.
If government policy becomes unpopular, the Sweden Democrats can claim they were not actually in government.
If popular policies associated with their agenda pass, they can claim credit.
This is the classic problem of support without responsibility.
Minority and coalition governments need clear agreements partly so voters can determine which party is responsible for which policies.
Transparency in coalition bargaining therefore matters democratically.
Otherwise parliamentary negotiation becomes an opaque process through which parties exercise power while avoiding accountability.
Sweden’s election also demonstrates why describing European politics as a uniform shift towards the far right remains too simplistic.
The Social Democrats actually increased their vote and remain the largest party. The right won because several parties collectively obtained a tiny parliamentary advantage.
This is not a country in which half the electorate suddenly became nationalist.
It is a fragmented democracy in which a nationalist party has become large enough to reshape coalition arithmetic.
That distinction matters.
Political systems often change at the margins.
A movement does not need majority support to transform government formation.
It needs enough support to become pivotal.
This is why small changes in vote share can produce large changes in political power.
Sweden’s proportional electoral system makes that especially visible because national vote shares translate relatively closely into parliamentary representation.
The right’s majority is only three seats.
That creates a government whose survival will depend heavily on maintaining cooperation among parties with genuine ideological differences.
The Sweden Democrats, Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals agree on some questions and disagree on others. The Liberals in particular have historically been much more uncomfortable about cooperation with the Sweden Democrats.
Coalition therefore creates internal constraints.
This may be one of the strongest safeguards against assuming that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral breakthrough means their programme simply becomes government policy.
Political influence will be negotiated.
Again, democracy aggregates rather than simply awards.
The election also reveals how political normalisation occurs incrementally. Ten years ago, cooperation with the Sweden Democrats was politically toxic for much of the Swedish centre-right. Then informal cooperation became discussable. Policy positions converged in particular areas. Electoral arithmetic changed. Now some form of parliamentary dependence appears likely.
There was no single moment when the political boundary disappeared.
It moved gradually.
This is why norms deserve attention before they collapse completely.
Political change often occurs through precedent.
One cooperation agreement makes the next less extraordinary.
One rhetorical shift changes what another politician can say.
Eventually yesterday’s taboo becomes today’s coalition negotiation.
That can represent healthy democratic adaptation when a previously excluded electorate gains representation.
It can represent democratic erosion when previously unacceptable anti-democratic behaviour becomes normal.
The difficult task is distinguishing between them.
We should not decide the answer simply from the Sweden Democrats’ vote share.
Twenty per cent demonstrates political relevance.
It does not establish democratic virtue.
Nor should the party’s historical origins determine the answer permanently.
History provides evidence.
Current behaviour provides evidence too.
Institutions need to process both.
Perhaps that is the more mature way to think about political normalisation.
The question is not “Should this party be allowed into normal politics?” Voters have already placed it inside normal politics by giving it 73 seats.
The question is what standards should apply once it is there?
The answer should be the same standards applied to every party, enforced more consistently rather than selectively: respect constitutional procedures, accept election outcomes, protect opposition rights, obey the law and recognise that electoral victory does not eliminate the rights of people who voted against you.
Those principles matter more than ideological labels.
Sweden’s established parties now face the consequences of a political strategy that worked for years and then became increasingly difficult to sustain. Excluding the Sweden Democrats did not make their voters disappear. Some of the issues feeding their support were real enough that other parties eventually changed policy in response.
The Sweden Democrats face a different transition.
They have spent years arguing that the establishment refused to listen.
The electorate has now made them impossible to ignore.
That removes one excuse.
Influence brings responsibility.
A party can remain an outsider while receiving 5%.
At 20%, eventually it has to demonstrate what it wants to build rather than only what it wants to stop.
That may be the real significance of Sweden’s election.
Not that an excluded party has suddenly become acceptable.
Not that Swedish voters have collectively embraced the far right.
It is that political exclusion has reached the limits of what electoral arithmetic can sustain.
Sweden now has to attempt something harder than keeping an uncomfortable political movement outside the room.
Its institutions have to remain strong enough to let that movement inside without allowing any movement, old or new, to own the room.
