Swedes go to the polls on Sunday 13 September in an election that will measure how far the country has travelled from the tolerant, pragmatic reputation it cultivated for decades. Opinion polls give the centre-left opposition a slender lead, but the campaign has been fought on terrain largely defined by the far-right Sweden Democrats, whose ideas have migrated from the fringe to the centre of government policy since the 2022 Tidö agreement.
The agreement that broke the cordon sanitaire
When the conservative bloc won the 2022 election by a razor-thin margin, the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals formed a minority government dependent on the Sweden Democrats. The Tidö agreement, signed that December, formalised the arrangement: the far-right party received no ministerial portfolios but gained extraordinary leverage over legislation. At the time, establishment conservatives argued the pact would blunt the Sweden Democrats' appeal. Instead, it handed them the policy initiative on migration, crime, energy and education.
Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister, once promised a Holocaust survivor he would never cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. "My values are not those of the Sweden Democrats," he said in 2018. "I will not cooperate, engage in dialogue, collaborate, or form a coalition government with the Sweden Democrats." Now he has pledged to give them cabinet positions if the right-wing bloc retains power.
Migration enforcement reaches children and the elderly
The practical consequences appear in decisions that have drawn domestic and international attention. A baby named Emanuel, born to parents legally resident in Sweden, was ordered removed to Iran before his first birthday after the rules tightened around his family's permits. Raif, a four-year-old autistic boy who cannot speak and still wears nappies, received a deportation notice before media pressure forced a reversal. A 74-year-old British man with dementia was told to leave after 25 years in the country. Another British pensioner, living on a World Bank retirement income, was informed his pension did not meet new income thresholds because it was not classified as salary.
Kristersson defended the approach: "We cannot adjust the law based on each and every personal fate." The line has become a refrain for a government that frames migration almost exclusively as a security and cost issue. Ministers increasingly depict migrants, including children, as risks rather than rights-holders.
Institutional alarms over rights erosion
The Swedish Institute for Human Rights, an independent government agency, used its 2026 annual report to express "serious concern" over what it describes as growing acceptance of xenophobic views, hate crimes and punitive policies directed at children. The legal watchdog Civil Rights Defenders argues a broader shift has taken place: the government no longer speaks the language of rights but of control. Both bodies point to a pattern of legislation passed against the advice of experts, criminologists and social scientists.
The European Commission's rule of law monitoring framework has flagged similar trends across member states, though Sweden's speed of change has surprised observers who regarded its democratic foundations as unusually solid.
A scandal at the heart of the far-right operation
In the campaign's final weeks, Expo, a magazine that monitors far-right extremism, reported that Gustav Gellerbrant, one of the Sweden Democrats' most influential ideologues and a Tidö agreement architect, allegedly maintains deep ties to Russian influence operations. Gellerbrant sits in the party's coordinating office within the government and lives with a partner who also works for the party. He has been placed on paid leave. Peter Hultqvist, a former Social Democrat defence minister, called the matter a "security crisis" for Sweden that "goes right into the prime minister's own office". Gellerbrant denounced a media "witch-hunt", a rhetorical strategy borrowed from US populism that has become the default Swedish far-right response to scrutiny.
Climate science and cultural exclusion
The rightward turn extends beyond migration. Johan Rockström, a climate scientist who has advised every Swedish government in recent decades, says the current administration has not contacted him once. The government has also advanced a "cultural canon" that defines Swedishness through a narrow historical lens, Ingmar Bergman, Ikea, Pippi Longstocking, the Viggen fighter jet, while excluding all works from the multicultural Sweden that emerged after 1975. In Lidingö, Stockholm's wealthiest suburb, a conservative politician's call to ban "strange Peruvian fish stews" from school cafeterias barely registered as news.
Opposition struggles to offer an alternative vision
The Social Democrats and their allies lead in polls but run a cautious campaign reminiscent of Denmark's Social Democrats or the UK Labour Party under Keir Starmer. They have not articulated a clear ideological counter-narrative, relying instead on poll-tested centrist positions. That strategy has failed progressive parties elsewhere as voters gravitate toward anti-establishment alternatives. Roger Akelius, a billionaire who previously voted conservative, broke ranks to declare he would not support the right-wing coalition: "Sweden can't build a future on isolation and prisons."
People mentioned
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Roger Akelius
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Johan Rockström
Organisations
Government of Sweden · Sweden Democrats · Social Democrats · Swedish Institute for Human Rights · Civil Rights Defenders · Expo
