Sweden’s high-stakes general election is heading toward a knife-edge finish that could yet hand power to the far right, according to official forecasts.
With most results now declared, the left-wing bloc of Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson has a one-seat lead over conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s four-party right-wing alliance. The final outcome of Sunday’s vote may not be known until Wednesday.
For months, Andersson’s left-wing bloc had been leading comfortably in the polls, but the race tightened dramatically in the last two weeks of the campaign.
Speaking after midnight on Monday, she said the results so far pointed to an “even” outcome. “But right now we are leading and if this holds up, Sweden will get a new government,” she said, to cheers from thousands of supporters gathered at her party’s glitzy election night reception.
The vote is a watershed moment for Sweden and will be watched closely elsewhere in Europe, where other nationalist parties are gaining ground.
If he continues in office, Kristersson has promised to give ministerial posts to members of the populist nationalist Sweden Democrats, a strongly anti-immigration party founded in the 1980s by neo-Nazis. That would be a first in a country that had until recently shunned the far right.
Kristersson has been governing for the past four years with support from the Sweden Democrats in parliament, but without giving them a formal role in the coalition.
He said the closeness of the result would make forming a government “complicated,” but insisted the left had failed to win a majority for its “socialist” economic program.
Kristersson added he would talk to other party leaders. “Where it ends remains to be seen,” he told his supporters at the Moderates’ election night party in central Stockholm. “But we are not in a hurry.”
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