Three Key Issues
Sweden’s September 13 election gave the center-left a razor-thin majority, but no ideological mandate. The left barely moved its vote share, and its government depends on a Center Party that would rather force a new election than let the Left Party into cabinet. The far right’s losses were real, but no party, left or right, offered a comprehensive program to address systemic long-term threats like ecological breakdown, economic concentration, unregulated artificial intelligence, or nuclear war, leaving those questions outside what this election actually contested. This essay continues a story I have told about Swedish parliamentary elections in 2010, 2014, and 2022: a pattern of progressive marginalization that persists even as its specific contours shift from election to election.
In 2026, the left did not win an ideological mandate, the far-right lost parliamentary weight, and centrist path dependency now shapes Swedish governance. On September 13, Sweden held its parliamentary elections. The result, the Center-Left bloc (comprised of the Social Democrats, Left Party, Green Party and Center Party) had 176 parliamentary seats compared to the Right-Center bloc (comprised of the Moderate Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats and Swedish Democrats) having 173. To understand this election, one must distinguish between three outcomes: the left’s failure to win an ideological mandate, the far-right’s loss of parliamentary weight, and the persistence of centrist path dependency in Swedish governance. All these tendencies trace back to the Swedish model. Historically built on export-led growth and a corporate-managed labor compact, modern social democracy now struggles against domestic militarism, shifting geopolitical alignments, and a welfare state eroded by the decline of its foundational intermediary institutions.
The Swedish model was itself partly built on winning at the ballot box to compensate for organized labor’s weakening position vis-à-vis the business world; the right-wing bloc now exploits the economic failures that follow from free markets, energy shocks, and inflation to capture that same electoral terrain. The present election shows the left bloc muddling through on voter discontent with right-wing mismanagement, but without a parallel extension of power into the economic sphere, this leaves the left with a defensive, incremental politics that cannot address the underlying problems.
Path dependency is the likely result when progressive forces fail to accumulate economic, media, and political power systematically. The consequence is that policies aimed at equitable economic reconstruction become less likely when progressive forces operate only through the policy windows created by mainstream institutions.
The Left Has Not Won despite One Bright Spot
The center-left won the election through parliamentary arithmetic, but without a triumphant ideological mandate (as the Social Democrats hit historical lows). The Social Democrats lost eight parliamentary seats from 2022, ending up with 99. The Left Party increased its parliamentary representation the most with six seats and the Green Party gained four seats. This net gain of two seats obscures rather than demonstrates a leftward shift, since it depends entirely on how “the left” is defined.
First, polling data compiled by Gothenburg University researchers and Swedish television showed that on the most important issues, the left had no dominant advantage. Voters were most motivated by healthcare, schooling and education, and the Swedish economy (important to 53%, 51% and 48% of voters respectively). The closeness of the election and constraints on left electoral success were partially shaped by the relative advantages of the right and left blocs on such key issues.
Voters prioritized three main issues, and the left bloc held only a narrow advantage on one of them:
+ Healthcare: 53% favored the left bloc; 48% favored the right bloc.
+Schooling and Education: The right bloc held a slight advantage.
+ Economy: the right bloc held a clear advantage (54% to 45%). Employment: statistically tied (Social Democrats at 33%, Moderate Party at 32%).
On the most important issue, healthcare, the left held a five-point advantage. That is not nothing, but it is far short of the decisive mandate that would justify calling this election a left victory.
One reason the Green Party did not do better was that climate questions actually reduced in importance by 4%. Four years of the right bloc led to cancellation of wind projects, advancement of nuclear power, and gas subsidies that helped diminish Sweden’s capacity to meet climate targets. The evenness of the election and lack of dominant advantages for the left on key questions is partially related to confusion as to whether government or private actors best manage schools and healthcare and what level of management (local or national government) is best suited to organize public services. The election cycle overlapped with news stories about failing schools and erosion of some healthcare services, however.
Second, non-left forces dominate majority voter preferences. In 2022, 42.16% of all voters voted for the Social Democratic, Left Party or Green Party. In 2026, this percentage increased to only 43%. As a result, the oppositional parliamentary majority depends on the Center Party, which increased its total parliamentary representation to 25 seats (which increased its total share of the vote by .32%). Center Party leader Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist said she would rather see a new election than a government that includes the Left Party. Before and after the election, the Left Party demanded ministerial representation as a condition for supporting a Social Democratic Prime Minister. Both parties gained votes, but neither gained enough to dictate terms. This stalemate, not ideological affinity, is what gives the Center Party its leverage. The only way out of this impasse will be concessions from both sides (moderating the left’s influence), a coalition with parties further to the right (which seems unlikely if not impossible), or a new election if no parliamentary majority can be established.
In the 2026 election, I estimate that about 10.5% of the Social Democrats’ voters and 31.9% of the Center Party’s voters came from right wing bloc supporters in the last election. This estimate is based on comparing 2022 party vote shares with 2026 polling data, and it should be treated as approximate rather than precise. So former right bloc voters sit anchored in these parties and that potentially moderates what they do. Yet, many of the former right bloc voters shifted to the Center Party and Social Democrats because of their dislike if not disgust of the Liberal Party’s cooperation with the far right Swedish Democrats (SD) after the last election. Yet centrist voters who defected from the right bloc did so primarily to punish the Liberal Party’s cooperation with the Sweden Democrats. They are not leftists. Their presence inside the left bloc constrains what that bloc can propose.
Third, every party except the Left Party supports NATO membership, and every party including the Left Party supports arms transfers to Ukraine. Whether these positions amount to militarism depends on definition, and that definitional question matters for the argument that follows. If militarism means excessive devotion to military solutions, then supporting arms transfers to a state defending against invasion is not automatically anti-militarist. A defensible anti-militarism could support Ukrainian self-defense while opposing NATO expansion, permanent military budget increases, and the foreclosure of diplomacy, but Swedish practice does not maintain that distinction. It collapses it. Arms transfers to Ukraine provoke Russia, which helps military politicians and the media establish a threat, deepening Swedish military budgets and NATO engagements. Moves that Sweden treats as defensive are read by Russia as provocative, prompting hybrid warfare responses that empower Swedish actors demanding further military budget increases and deeper NATO cooperation. The result is a zero sum game between so-called “solidarity” with Ukraine and reduction of Swedish militarism, as measured in budgets, justification of war maneuvers, endorsement of military deals with the US, and opportunity costs for a comprehensive Green Deal.
In my review of a key parliamentary debate during the first phase of the Ukraine war, I found no party that introduced or advocated a negotiated settlement, even during the period when diplomatic openings were most widely discussed internationally. This finding rests on original research conducted for a longer study, the details of which are beyond the scope of this essay. One qualification is necessary: the Christian Democratic Party argued that arms sales were needed to strengthen Ukraine’s position in future negotiations, which is a diplomatic rationale for military support rather than a rejection of diplomacy.
The Swedish media largely marginalized discussion of arms races, the limits of military power, the risks of nuclear war, and diplomacy. Until a left challenges the agenda setting that promotes military solutions at the expense of diplomatic ones, left parties gaining votes cannot be counted as victories for left causes. This is not a new problem. Left parties in Germany and France backed their respective militaries during World War I, so left politics and militarism have been connected in practice before.
At the series of public debates and discussions of leading professionals and elites in the multi-day discussion workshops called Almedalen this summer (in the town of Visby on the island of Gotland), various seminars addressed how to further militarize society, e.g. churches and universities, against foreign threats. While cyber-threats (like floods which require defensive preparation) are real and must be defended against, the boundary between necessary security and militarism (excessive devotion to security or military needs) is very thin. Military forces in Sweden are demanding preparation from diverse parts of civil society in the event of war, while the diplomatic and smart power influences of the country have diminished. This posture reflects Sweden losing some foreign policy autonomy (its mixed neutrality and under-the-radar NATO cooperation posture) when formally joining NATO as a member, and even more autonomy vis-à-vis the US and the European Union upon formally joining NATO. With the Defense Cooperation Agreement, a bilateral military cooperation between Sweden and the US formalized on August 15, 2024, Sweden will host 17 military bases to which the U.S. military will have unimpeded access. This figure comes from the agreement’s published text, though the practical implications for Swedish sovereignty remain contested.
Additionally, by participating in NATO expansion, itself one reason for the Russia-Ukraine war, failing to create alternatives to the established corporate dominance of the economy, and never establishing or endorsing a comprehensive cooperative production model, Sweden and its left parties focus on downstream issues of distribution, welfare state organization, or favored foreign policy causes. Again, while the Left Party is a holdout on NATO membership, they have endorsed the arms-exports-to-Ukraine and military budget increase model. The absence of large-scale industrial cooperatives, and a general posture of concessions to Russia, have been embraced as logical consequences of virtuous capitalism and U.S. foreign policy preferences as the natural state of things. Aside from a few anarchist holdouts, now “old fashioned” leftists, and cooperative advocates, the Swedish left has been built on such weak foundations. Some Left Party intellectuals have even argued that large military budgets did not impinge on the welfare state, while others in their camp critique Swedish militarism (but don’t fully explain the logic of anti-militarism).
There was one bright spot for left politics and that was a backlash against the far right party leader Jimmie Åkesson and successful organizing efforts by the Left Party in key immigrant- dense urban areas. This phenomenon parallels ethnic mobilizing in places like New York, Michigan, and more recently Berlin in which left candidates win office. In Swedish Television’s final pre-election debate on integration, Åkesson declared, “This could be the first election in Sweden where the Muslim immigration we’ve had decides the outcome of a parliamentary election. Chew on that.”
The Dagens Nyheter newspaper writers Niklas Orrenius and Alexander Mahmoud helped investigate these developments. In the analysis that follows, I elaborate on their reporting. They explain that Åkesson motivated many Muslim voters to support the Left Party. In Örebro, a small city in Sweden, the Left Party accelerated organizing efforts. They knocked on around 10,000 doors in Örebro this year compared to only 600 in 2022. The Örebro Mosque actively encouraged its members to vote. In the Vivalla multi-ethnic enclave, a neighborhood where in the past as many as 75% have had an immigrant background, the Left Party increased its vote share dramatically. Left Party vote share rose sharply across Vivalla’s three districts: east (17.5% → 45.7%), west (16.6% → 44.8%), and north (12.92% → 38.7%) from 2022 to 2026.
The identitarian populist, immigrant party Nyans, experienced dramatic losses, as did the Center Party to a lesser extent. Collectively the losses of these parties represented 83% of the Social Democratic and Left parties’ increases in the east district, 70% in the west district, and another 70% in the north district. In sum, more extensive political organizing by highly motivated activists shows a potential way out of part of the left’s national impasse.
The Far Right Has Lost
If the left’s gains were narrow and contested, the far right’s losses were unambiguous. The far right led by the SD advanced several related themes in the last election: rising crime, too high immigration levels, and the connection between the two, i.e. a law and order and migration exclusion agenda, particularly focused on Muslims. They also gained power from disgruntled, unemployed voters. They carried these ideas into the 2026 election. In this election, they dropped to 17.48% of the vote and gained only 62 seats. This marked a 3.06% loss in vote share and a 15.1% drop in parliamentary weight. This constitutes their first electoral decline since entering parliament. Even so, the party retains 62 seats compared to the Social Democrats’ 99.
The result of rising gas prices, increased inequality and accelerated military budgets which potentially favor austerity has helped the far right in Germany, with promises of lower gas prices and crime favoring the Swedish Right bloc in the 2022 elections. In Sweden, debt-financed military budgets have limited some forms of austerity, and gas subsidies favored by the right have diminished voter discontent although inequality continues to widen. As SD took part in the governance of the country after the previous election, they became responsible for economic and political outcomes.
Political commentators argue that SD’s successes in reducing gasoline prices, crime, and immigration levels, and the replication of their views by other parties right and center, have led voters to go elsewhere. For example, by mid-September of this year, Swedes paid the second lowest costs of twenty-seven EU states for Euro-Super 95 gasoline after taxes. From 2020 to 2025, the number of asylum seekers decreased by 48%. The number of shootings in Sweden decreased from 391 in 2022 (a highpoint) to only 158 last year, a decrease of 60%. A poll comparing voters in the 2022 and 2026 election describing issues having very great significance for voters showed how these changes reduced voter priorities for issues that helped the right win the last election. Polls showed that energy and nuclear power issues became 12% less significant, law and order 3% less significant. The concern for issues related to refugees and migration remained steady, with 39% thinking these were very important over the election interval. The changes wrought by the right bloc kept the election close, however.
Centrist Path Dependency, Consensus and Social Sabotage
The formal centrist parties are the Center Party and the Liberal Party, but many of the more liberal members of the Liberal party exited for the left bloc. The Liberal Party gained much of its support in the current election from voters who had previously backed other right-wing parties. During the election, the Liberal Party struck a mutual support bargain with the Sweden Democrats, backing their bid to enter the government formally if the right bloc won. The key to centrist path dependency, however, is not simply the dependency of the left bloc on a Center Party that favors regulated free market solutions, lower taxes, and the status quo in foreign policy.
While Center Party-gatekeeping is one key factor, the other factor is what can best be called “social sabotage.” By “social sabotage,” I mean a specific pattern of governance: resolving immediate structural crises by externalizing their costs onto future generations. This pattern has four observable manifestations. First, ecological degradation: lowering gas prices to reduce voter discontent while failing to meet climate targets. Second, debt-financed militarism: funding military budget increases through borrowing rather than taxation or reallocation, and accepting foreign military bases in place of an independent assessment of the Russian threat. Third, demographic neglect: restricting immigration rather than investing in integration, despite a low birth rate that will soon cause population decline. Fourth, industrial abdication: the absence of a comprehensive national industrial policy, which leaves failing auto and battery producers dependent on Chinese and American firms rather than on domestic public investment.
The right solves the problem of high gas prices by lowering them, further eroding Sweden’s capacity to address ecocide. They solve the problem of high military spending by financing budget increases with debt, which functions as a de facto tax on younger generations and reduces the fiscal capacity available for the welfare state. They solve the problem of immigration by demonizing immigrants and restricting entry rather than improving integration, despite demographic challenges caused by a low birth rate. In the coming years deaths will exceed births and migration alone will contribute to the population increase. Yet there was a backlash against immigration, driven by a SD-led campaign of xenophobia and Islamophobia. The result is ecological degradation, debt, and demographic decline, alongside growing economic inequality and persistently high long-term unemployment, particularly among immigrants.
Meanwhile, large-scale potential threats such as under-regulated artificial intelligence development and nuclear weapons proliferation played no significant role in the election. The military budget and its opportunity costs also went undebated, with one exception: a short television news story noting that no debate had occurred, given the new all-parliamentary consensus to prop up military budgets
Solutions
A reinvigorated Swedish democracy is the key to meeting large-scale threats and reversing the damage created by media filtering and a consensus culture that defaults to the lowest common denominator. As in the U.S. debate about the Democratic Socialists of America, the Swedish Left Party’s successes show the gains that canvassing can produce, but they also show its limits. Those Swedish limits are defined by an incapacity to challenge militarism, ecocide, and inequality.
Solutions can be found in a deliberate, multi-step sequence designed to construct organizational counterweights to incumbent security and fossil-fuel lobbies. We must ask how minority left parties can challenge foreign policy orthodoxy and militarism when the entire political and media establishment enforces a strict consensus. We must match policy advocacy to institutional development.
The Örebro case shows that intensive local organizing can move votes. But it also shows the limits of that model. The Left Party gained ground in immigrant-dense neighborhoods by responding to a specific threat: Åkesson’s explicit anti-Muslim rhetoric. That is defensive mobilization, not a comprehensive challenge to militarism, ecocide or inequality. To move from defense to offense, the left needs a strategy that connects local organizing to national policy. The first step is to dismantle security orthodoxy by exposing how military mobilization crowds out the fiscal and productive capacity required for ecological reconstruction. A large-scale climate march in Stockholm this summer, drawing an estimated 50,000 people, shows that the ecological and peace constituencies already exist and can be brought together. But the march did not convert that energy into sufficiently targeted proposals, institutional demands, or electoral pressure that distinguished among parties. It demonstrated latent support without building the organizational capacity to use it. Closing that gap is what the first proposal must address.
Dismantling security orthodoxy requires an informational campaign, and it can build on the march’s recent attempt to link ecological and peace movements. A combination of critical research, study circles, and media campaigning could initiate this work. There has been insufficient critical research on the security dilemma itself: how Sweden’s militarist expansion can provoke Russian responses, which in turn justify further Swedish militarization
Second, it is necessary to build a green industrial policy that uses state procurement and public investment as strategic instruments to reshape supply chains. This proposal addresses the left’s failure to offer an alternative to corporate dominance of the economy. The Social Democrats and Center Party could canvass industrial and business communities about their research, development, and finance needs. Effective industrial policy is partially foreclosed by military spending, European Union constraints, and a lack of advocacy for industrial policy itself. So at the very least, the right part of the left bloc could promote green transitions.
Third, expand economic cooperatives as a structural tool to combat long-term unemployment, social exclusion, and decentralized energy stagnation. As Seymour Melman put it, “in order to survive, a society must produce. A left politics confined to distributing the output of a militarized, finance-dominated economy is not contesting who controls production in the first place. More public education campaigns are needed to link economic democracy to reducing inequality, expanding energy provision, and building a stable funding base for alternative institutions. Cooperative development could also be linked to increasing the progressive non-profit banking sector, which has been undeveloped and under-patronized. From 2022 to 2025, the operating profits of Swedish banks increased by 61%, with these banks earning 544 billion crowns, or about $55 billion.
Fourth, mobilize higher education by aligning university procurement, campus infrastructure, and curricula with broader labor and environmental movements. This agenda might be taken up by the youth wings of the Green Party and the Left Party, while the critical wings of the environmental and peace movements could act as a trigger for their engagement.
Finally, deepen grassroots organizing by linking localized canvassing to the creation of durable democratic institutionsrather than treating canvassing simply as voter or supporter recruitment. In Sweden, this could build on the country’s traditions of study circles and popular movements by connecting local organizing to independent community media, collective research, and democratic economic initiatives such as cooperatives and community-owned enterprises. Local groups could identify problems through door-to-door organizing, investigate them through study circles and local journalism, and then develop collective economic or political responses with residents, workers, businesses, unions, and other institutions. The aim is to create a reinforcing cycle in which organizing generates knowledge, media generates public capacity, and economic institutions give communities continuing resources and power to act.
In sum, the left did not win an ideological mandate for a comprehensive ecological agenda that opposes surplus military spending and reduces inequality. The far right lost parliamentary weight but partially diffused its agenda by shifting the terms of Swedish political consensus. Centrists won not by gaining electoral representation but by holding the left bloc hostage to their views. The result is a parliament that looks center-left and a policy landscape that remains center-right. If energy prices, crime, employment, or macroeconomic conditions deteriorate, the Sweden Democrats will regain the ground they lost and a further right government becomes likely in 2030.
That outcome is not inevitable. Centrism and its electoral bargains leave the underlying contradictions in place. Social Democrats have typically managed those contradictions politically, through coalition deals and welfare adjustments, rather than economically, by changing how production and investment are organized. Linking canvassing to cooperatives, social inclusion programs and green industrial policy could break that cycle.
