Far right party fails to make breakthrough in Swedish election, exit polls suggest

Exit polls suggest that the far right has narrowly failed to make a breakthrough in a knife-edge election in Sweden.

A conclusive result will not be known until the early hours of Monday morning, and if the race is particularly close, the final reckoning may not come until the middle of the week. Small shifts in voter support among the eight main parliamentary parties could yet determine whether the next government is led by the left or the right.

The election has revealed Sweden to be a nation deeply ill at ease with immigration, with the SD able to exploit fears over violent crime to shift the political debate rightwards.

The electoral debate was also punctuated by gang violence. Two weeks ago, a woman and her five-year-old child were injured after being caught in crossfire in Eskilstuna, west of Stockholm. In Malmö a week earlier, a 15-year-old boy shot dead a gang leader in a shopping mall. The number of fatal shootings rose sharply to 34 in the first six months of this year, up from 20 in the same period of 2021.

Party leaders on the left and the right competed with each other to link the rise in violent crime to large-scale immigration, which has led to high levels of segregation along ethnic lines in the housing and jobs markets. In the space of a few decades, Sweden has become one of the most multicultural societies in Europe, with more than a third of the population having been born abroad or having a parent who was born abroad. About 30% of children do not have Swedish as their mother tongue, rising to 45% in parts of the cities.

Problems experienced by immigrants in Sweden were previously discussed in terms of shortcomings in the Swedish model, but now immigrants themselves had become the problem, said Jonas Hinnfors, politics professor at Gothenburg University.