Sweden Votes Sunday. The Question on the Ballot Is Whether a Party With Neo-Nazi Roots Gets Cabinet Seats.

STOCKHOLM — Swedes go to the polls on Sunday to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag in a race that has narrowed to a few points and that both sides have turned into a referendum on one party. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's center-right Moderates have governed since 2022 as a minority with the Christian Democrats and Liberals, propped up from outside the cabinet by the Sweden Democrats. This time Kristersson has said plainly that if the right wins, the Sweden Democrats get ministerial posts.

That would be a first. The Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010 and became the country's second-largest party in 2022. Under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led the party since 2005, it has spent two decades trying to shed its origins in Sweden's neo-Nazi and white-supremacist movement and present itself as a mainstream nationalist party. Its platform calls for deporting undocumented immigrants, tougher citizenship rules, strict assimilation requirements and restricting social security to citizens. Its support runs strongest among men and working-class voters outside the big cities.

The polls give the opposition a thin edge. An Indikator Opinion survey conducted September 2 to 10 put the center-left bloc at 50.8% and the governing bloc at 47.6%. Novus had the gap at 2.6 points a week out, 50.3% to 47.7%, while SVT/Verian still showed a lead of around eight points. The trend has run one way: the Social Democrats slid to 25.8% in Novus, their weakest of the campaign, while the Sweden Democrats climbed to roughly 20 to 21% and second place.

Former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson leads the Social Democrats and a loose center-left alliance with the Greens, the Left Party and the Centre Party. Her bloc has campaigned on welfare funding, climate measures and inequality, and has warned that "civil liberties may be at risk" if the Sweden Democrats enter government. But the Centre Party refuses to cooperate with the Left Party, so even a center-left win would leave Andersson facing weeks of negotiation to build a majority or run a minority government. A right-wing win would be simpler: all four parties have already pledged to govern together.

Kristersson's argument is that Sweden needs a stable majority to deal with national security as NATO's newest member and with the gang violence that dominated the last election. The numbers on that have moved in his favor. Shootings fell from 391 in 2022 to 158 in 2025, and asylum immigration has dropped to its lowest level since 1985, a sharp reversal for a country of 11 million that took roughly 163,000 asylum applications in 2015 alone.

"Swedish politics has clearly moved in a more restrictive direction on issues such as immigration and crime," said Niklas Bolin, a political scientist at Mid Sweden University. Andreas Önnerfors, a professor of intellectual history at Linnaeus University, said the campaign's focus had shifted "from the true political challenges" to the question of who sits in government. Polls are open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time, and early voting has been under way since late August.