Sweden goes to the polls today with the possibility that the Sweden Democrats will enter government for the first time. That would be treated, reasonably enough, as a historic moment. A party founded partly by people from neo-Nazi and white supremacist milieus, once considered beyond the limits of respectable politics, could finally acquire cabinet posts. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has already said that if his right-wing bloc wins, the Sweden Democrats will receive significant influence and important ministries, including over immigration and integration. Kristersson’s offer to bring them formally into government marks a clear break with the barrier Swedish politics once maintained around the party.
Swedish Democrats already a strong influence on Government
The cabinet door matters, but perhaps less than it appears. The Sweden Democrats have spent the past four years outside government while exercising considerable influence over it. The Tidö agreement of 2022 allowed Kristersson’s minority coalition of Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals to govern with Sweden Democrat support. The arrangement was presented partly as a way of containing them. In practice, it helped move Swedish politics onto ground the Sweden Democrats had spent years preparing. Immigration was tightened, citizenship and integration became more conditional, criminal justice became more punitive and policies once considered politically extreme moved into ordinary governmental debate. The argument over how far Sweden has already shifted matters more than the choreography of who gets which ministry after the votes are counted.
Sweden was once used, especially abroad, as shorthand for a generous refugee regime and a confident multicultural welfare state. That image was always more complicated than its admirers imagined, but the change since the refugee crisis of 2015 has been substantial. The present government has tightened asylum and family-reunification rules, pushed harder assimilation requirements and substantially increased payments intended to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily. A government facing re-election is now paying some immigrants more to leave the country, a policy that would once have sat much closer to the Sweden Democrats’ political territory than to the centre of government.
Social Democrats moved to right
The Social Democrats have moved too. Their positions on immigration, integration and crime have hardened over the same period. This is where measuring the Sweden Democrats only by vote share starts to miss something. A party can lose elections and still win arguments. If its opponents increasingly accept the categories through which it describes the country, exclusion from office becomes less decisive than it looks.
The British comparison is not that Reform has already remade the state in the Swedish manner. It has not. The closer parallel is the pressure it exerts on the parties around it. Reform has helped push immigration rhetoric at Westminster sharply to the right, while Labour and the Conservatives increasingly compete over who can sound tougher on asylum, settlement and deportation. An analysis of parliamentary language found one of the steepest shifts towards hostile immigration rhetoric in a century, with researchers linking that movement to Farage’s return and the rise of Reform. Reform is itself being pushed from the right by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, whose harder programme on deportation allows it to accuse Farage of compromise whenever he attempts to broaden his appeal.
Reform/Restore pushing politics rightwards here
You can see the pressure travel. Before the Makerfield by-election, Farage moved towards barring foreign nationals from social housing and deporting those unable to find private accommodation while Restore was competing for the same nationalist electorate. That does not mean Restore dictated Reform’s policy, any more than Reform dictates every Labour announcement on migration. Politics rarely travels so mechanically. But the competitive field changes what becomes advantageous to say. Restore can push at Reform’s exposed flank; Reform’s growth puts pressure on the Conservatives; both Reform and the fear of losing working-class voters to its right weigh upon Labour. Sweden is further along because this kind of movement has already been translated into four years of governing arrangements, but the mechanism is recognisable.
The welfare state built by Swedish social democracy helped create one of the strongest traditions of universal social provision in Europe. The political struggle increasingly concerns who belongs inside that universality. Welfare, citizenship and nation have become more tightly bound together, with the argument shifting from what the social state should provide towards who can legitimately claim it. A weakened welfare settlement does not automatically produce demands for stronger universal provision. It can just as easily produce competition over entitlement, especially when housing is scarce, public services deteriorate and insecurity grows. The political anger generated by scarcity can then be redirected towards those accused of taking too much from what remains.
Social Democratic model restructured
Migration politics does not float free of those material conditions. Sweden has experienced rising inequality, housing pressures and the long restructuring of the social-democratic model. The Sweden Democrats offer an answer that leaves many of those underlying relations intact while redrawing the boundaries of solidarity more tightly around the nation. The state can remain generous, but only to the right people. Social provision is not abandoned so much as nationalised politically.
Crime has made that argument easier to advance because Sweden has faced a real problem of gang violence and shootings. The existence of the problem is not in dispute. What remains political is how it is explained. Housing segregation, labour markets, drugs, policing, inequality and long-term marginalisation offer one set of explanations. The claim that multiculturalism itself has failed offers another, simpler and more electorally potent one.
Kristersson’s government points to falling immigration and reduced gang violence as evidence that its approach is working. Critics point to the erosion of civil liberties and increasingly coercive demands for cultural assimilation. Reuters’ pre-election reporting captures how thoroughly crime, migration and identity now structure the contest. The argument is no longer simply over how Sweden should respond to a set of problems. It reaches into the question of what sort of country Sweden understands itself to be.
Crackdown on migrants
Some of the changes would have been difficult to imagine only a decade ago. Martin Gelin has pointed to tougher deportation practices, the treatment of migrant children and plans for prisons capable of holding children as young as 14, while the Swedish Institute for Human Rights has expressed concern about the growing acceptance of xenophobic attitudes and punitive policies. His account of Sweden’s political transformation is strongest when it shows how far the terms of normal politics have moved rather than simply lamenting a lost national innocence.
There was never a pristine social-democratic Sweden waiting to be corrupted by the far right. The Swedish model contained class division, racism and coercive state power like every other capitalist settlement. By the 1990s, marketisation, financial liberalisation and privatisation were already eroding parts of the post-war compromise. The Sweden Democrats did not destroy an untouched welfare state. They grew inside a country whose older political settlement had already been weakened by forces much larger than themselves.
A politics once organised more strongly around class became less capable of explaining insecurity in class terms. The labour movement weakened. Social democracy accommodated itself to markets it had once promised to discipline. Universalism survived rhetorically while becoming harder to sustain materially. Nationalism offered a different explanation for the deterioration: Sweden remains generous, but generosity has been abused; the country remains prosperous, but outsiders have taken too much; the problem is not the retreat of collective provision but the people allowed access to it.
The Sweden Democrats did not have to invent every anxiety. They had to give those anxieties a political shape.
Political gender gap
Their rise also cuts across another division that is often treated separately from class and migration. Swedish polling has shown a substantial gender gap, with men much more likely than women to support the Sweden Democrats. Statistics Sweden found support among men at roughly twice the level among women, while women were considerably more likely to back the Social Democrats. The widening political gender gap sits alongside similar patterns elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, where younger men in particular have moved towards parties offering harder accounts of national belonging, order and authority.
Class insecurity, migration, gender, regional inequality, crime and the decline of older political loyalties do not merge neatly into one explanation. The Sweden Democrats’ achievement has been to make them feel as if they do, binding different grievances together through a story of national loss.
Whether Swedish voters endorse that story today remains uncertain. The centre-left opposition led by Magdalena Andersson enters polling day with a narrow lead, although the gap has tightened. Coalition arithmetic is awkward on both sides. Kristersson’s bloc may depend on the Liberals clearing the 4 per cent parliamentary threshold, while Andersson would have to reconcile opposition parties divided over taxation, nuclear power and the role of the Left Party. Recent polling has shown the race tightening, with neither bloc guaranteed an easy route to government.
Whoever wins Swedish Democrats have not lost
Andersson remains one of Sweden’s most trusted politicians and has campaigned on welfare investment, tax fairness and social cohesion, bringing questions of distribution back into the argument. Even a centre-left victory, though, would not return Sweden to the political terrain that existed before the Tidö agreement. On migration and crime especially, the centre has already moved.
If the right wins and the Sweden Democrats take ministries, a formal barrier will have fallen. If the centre-left wins, much of the political ground on which that government operates will still have been prepared by the Sweden Democrats and by the wider rightward movement that made their assumptions increasingly ordinary.
Sweden may decide today whether the Sweden Democrats finally enter the cabinet. The harder part is working out how much of their politics got there first.