Back to a brighter future: The left is set to return to power in Sweden after the failure of right-wing reforms

In the fall of 2022, Sweden underwent an electoral shift that ended the era of Social Democratic rule traditional for Nordic countries. The right-wing coalition led by Ulf Kristersson came to power on the wave of a security crisis. In 2022, voters were driven less by ideological preference than by a sense of losing control over the familiar course of life.

The catalyst for disillusionment with the center-left was an alarming surge in street violence that turned once-quiet Swedish towns into arenas of criminal warfare, waged by gangs of teens recruited by criminal bosses from disadvantaged neighborhoods — minors who can escape criminal prosecution because of their age.

Years of neglecting the problems tied to the rise of isolated suburban ghettos and criminal gangs, combined with an outdated and ineffective anti-drug policy, led to a sharp rise in the number of deadly shootouts between rival gangs. For years, the Social Democrats tried to treat this social wound with soft measures and integration programs. The right, by contrast, offered voters a clear and tough answer: they promised to restore law and order through expanded police powers, mass searches, and an increase in the prison population.

In the mind of the average citizen, crime was inseparable from failures in the country’s migration policy. Society expects newcomers to assimilate, but instead Sweden has experienced cultural segregation and a significant strain on social funds due to high unemployment among migrants.

In this context, the right-wing parties made a historic compromise, lifting the decades-long “cordon sanitaire” — the unspoken ban on forming a coalition with the far-right nationalists of the Sweden Democrats (SD). The united right-wing bloc stated bluntly that the humanitarian superpower could no longer fulfill its mission. The bloc promised to close the borders and restrict immigrants’ rights.

The straw that tipped the balance in favor of the right-wing coalition was an economic shock in which an energy crisis spurred runaway inflation. Gas and electricity prices soared to historic highs, hitting the middle class hard.

The right skillfully exploited the moment, blaming the left-wing government for making a strategic mistake by shutting down Swedish nuclear plants in order to fast-track the green transition. The right’s promises to immediately cut fuel taxes and revive the nuclear program became the decisive argument for a nation tired of austerity.

In the end, voters backed the new leadership not out of hatred for socialism but out of a desire to restore stability. People placed their trust in those who promised to use a firm hand to restore order in a state that seemed to be falling apart.

The cabinet that came to power in Sweden under Ulf Kristersson, backed by the far-right nationalists of the Sweden Democrats, launched reforms touching the very foundations of the famous “welfare state.” What had been considered the gold standard of Nordic socialism for decades has, in recent years, become a testing ground for right-wing experiments. This policy brought about a social crisis that made Swedes doubt once again the permanence of their familiar way of life.

The right-wing government’s main thrust was to overhaul the philosophy of distributing public benefits. The cabinet attempted to abandon one of the core principles of the Swedish social system — universal, equal access to social guarantees based simply on residency in the country. Instead, they adopted the concept of tying benefit payments to employment and citizenship. The government introduced a so-called benefits cap, significantly cutting subsidies for the unemployed and large families. Authorities also launched a sweeping reform of the criteria that determine eligibility for benefits.

Particular controversy was sparked by a bill introducing a residency requirement for access to basic social protections, including housing subsidies and child and parental benefits. The new rules require migrants to have lived legally in Sweden for at least five years before they can claim full state assistance.

Experts from Stockholm University are convinced that such measures undermine the foundation of equality and fuel social tension. Alongside these restrictions, the government eliminated educational grants for vulnerable groups, justifying the move as necessary to push people into work. In practice, however, this marginalized the country’s poorest neighborhoods.

These reforms coincided with a crisis in healthcare and education — areas that are traditionally a strength for Sweden. In seeking to cut government spending while also lowering taxes for businesses and the wealthy, the government shifted the financial burden onto municipalities. As a result, Swedish healthcare faced chronic underfunding, staff shortages, and record growth in wait times for elective surgeries.

Schooling became one of the most painful issues in society. The education system was largely outsourced to private schools, which nevertheless continued to profit from budget subsidies. In the chase for state funding, private schools began artificially inflating grades for students, causing actual knowledge levels to plummet, while national exam results stopped reflecting reality. The situation is compounded by across-the-board cuts to qualified teachers and infrastructure. Coupled with growing segregation, the trend is rapidly dismantling what was once a model education system.

Police and migration services gained unprecedented powers under the right-wing government, and deportation now looms not only for those found guilty of criminal offenses but also for migrants who commit administrative violations, run up debts, or engage in an “improper lifestyle.”

The crisis of the Swedish model was the logical result of the right’s attempt to cross market fundamentalism with anti-migrant populism. The nation, accustomed to social security and predictability, got record unemployment, a withering healthcare system, and rising poverty. Amid this dismantling effort, Swedes are increasingly leaning toward the center-left, hoping to save what remains of what was once a model welfare state.

The right’s efforts to address three major challenges — rampant crime, a migration dead end, and an economic crisis — produced ambiguous results. On the one hand, the government demonstrated a genuine willingness to break old taboos. On the other, the side effects of this shock therapy created new sources of tension that have split society ahead of the upcoming parliamentary vote.

On the issue of combating street crime — the main trigger for the change of power  — the right can credit itself with figures that speak for themselves. Official Swedish police data record a sharp drop in violence, with the number of shooting incidents in the country less than half of what it was at its catastrophic peak in 2022. This was achieved through an unprecedented expansion of law enforcement powers, the introduction of blanket electronic surveillance without a court warrant, and the creation of so-called security zones, where police gained the right to conduct preventative searches.

Nevertheless, as noted in an official report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), despite the overall decline in criminal incidents, the number of firearm deaths is falling extremely slowly.

In 2025, 42 people were killed by gunfire, compared with 45 the year before. On top of that, instead of shootings, gangs are increasingly turning to bombings. Although the total number of such attacks does not look particularly large by global standards, Sweden is not most countries, and every such incident becomes a major scandal. At the same time, gangs have moved teen recruitment online in order to continue their brutal turf wars, often killing or injuring innocent bystanders.

A similarly harsh approach was applied to migration policy, as the government needed to meet the key demands of its far-right coalition partners. For the first time in half a century, Sweden recorded negative net migration. Refugees are now issued only temporary residence permits, with no guaranteed path to permanent residency. These measures have also affected refugees from Ukraine, who now struggle to obtain even a work permit despite the Sweden Democrats’ nominal support for Kyiv’s fight against Russian aggression.

Parliament keeps churning out one harsh law after another, including stripping migrants’ residency status over vague “improper conduct” allegations and the controversial requirement that public employees report undocumented migrants to the police. The changes have come at a high cost to Swedish business and the labor market, which is plagued by an acute talent shortage due to inflated salary thresholds for foreign specialists.

The government’s economic policy yielded the most contentious results. Together with the Riksbank, the cabinet managed to bring down runaway inflation, but doing so required cutting the key interest rate to one of the lowest levels in the EU and introducing a reduced VAT on food. This macroeconomic victory came at the cost of severe stagnation and a sharp rise in unemployment.

The prosperity the right promised in 2022 turned into harsh austerity on social spending, eroding public trust. Swedish voters sobered up once it became clear that fuel tax cuts and police on the streets could not offset the decline of the healthcare system and the drop in their quality of life. The attempt to cure Sweden’s chronic problems with right-wing populism and police batons produced a short-term security effect but stripped people of their confidence in what was once a model welfare state.

The implementation of Sweden’s hardline right-wing course has split society, sparking a prolonged debate over the price of public safety and the limits of humanism. The initial enthusiasm for the authorities’ decisive actions has given way to fatigue, skepticism, and mounting internal protest against methods many consider excessively repressive.

At first, voters shocked by the rampant crime approved of expanded police powers, preventive searches, and tough anti-migration laws. But as theory turned into practice, public sentiment swung the other way.

Recent polls show the opposition, led by the Social Democrats, with a combined rating above 50%, while the ruling coalition teeters on the edge of losing power. Swedes have shown they are willing to back a firm hand only as long as it restores the order that has been violated by gangs — not when it starts rewriting the basic ethical norms of Scandinavian society.

The so-called “snitch bill,” which would require teachers, doctors, and social workers to report undocumented migrants to police, drew particular outrage from the left opposition and professional unions. Public-sector workers launched mass protests against the measure, arguing that turning civil servants into agents of migration control would destroy the foundations of professional ethics and humanism.

Surveys by human rights organizations such as Civil Rights Defenders confirm that Swedish society has developed a deep-seated fear of a two-tier legal system taking shape, in which permanent residents of foreign origin become powerless hostages to bureaucratic arbitrariness. The idea of retroactively revoking previously granted permanent residence permits — a move affecting nearly 200,000 people — has stripped any semblance of fairness from the right’s migration policy.

While in 2022 Swedes were demanding protection from external threats, in 2026 they are increasingly demanding that Sweden itself be protected from the dismantling of its democratic institutions.

Left-wing activists and politicians describe Sweden’s economic dead end of recent years as a direct consequence of the rigidity and tactical missteps of Ulf Kristersson’s cabinet. The right-wing government made a classic mistake, trying to address the welfare state’s structural problems via austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, and administrative pressure on the labor market.

The right’s first and most painful mistake was a fanatically monetarist approach to combating inflation, which ended up strangling domestic demand. Determined to curb post-COVID price growth at any cost, the government fully backed the Riksbank’s aggressive interest rate hikes and abandoned targeted support for households.

Riksbank’s previous policy had involved decades of artificially inflating a debt bubble, and as a result, almost every citizen had taken out at least one loan. But the reversal of this ultra-loose monetary policy brought about an economic catastrophe. Years of near-zero and even negative rates accustomed the population to cheap money, driving Swedish household debt to above 150% of gross income, making the country one of the most indebted in Europe. 

With the vast majority of citizens burdened by punishing floating-rate mortgages, a sharp rise in the Riksbank’s base rate — aimed at fighting inflation — instantly bled family budgets dry. Swedes were forced to hand over the lion’s share of their income in order to service loans that had suddenly become far more expensive.

Instead of temporarily cushioning the shock for consumers, the cabinet took a wait-and-see approach. As a result, Swedish consumer spending collapsed, the property market entered a prolonged slump, and the construction sector — once a growth engine — effectively ground to a halt, triggering a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs.

The second strategic misstep lay at the intersection of fiscal policy and ideological commitments to far-right allies. Amid an evident liquidity shortfall, the Kristersson government pushed through ill-timed and unjust cuts to taxes on capital, high incomes, and property. The idea that these measures would spur business activity failed: large businesses chose to hold back funds amid the uncertainty, and the budget lost out on colossal sums.

To make ends meet, the government cut subsidies to regions and municipalities. Since local government in Sweden is responsible for social infrastructure, the move paralyzed municipal budgets, forcing hospitals and schools to cut staff and skimp on basic services, delivering the final blow to public confidence in right-wing governance.

The third devastating factor was an artificial barrier erected in Sweden’s labor market to appease the coalition’s anti-immigrant elements. A sharp rise in the minimum salary threshold for skilled foreign specialists blocked the inflow of talent into key technology and innovation sectors, and Swedish startups and industrial giants suddenly found they could no longer hire engineers, programmers, and researchers from abroad. 

At the same time, a harsh crackdown on low-skilled labor dealt a heavy blow to the services and municipal sectors, deepening the staffing crisis in the social sphere. The right’s attempt to prove that Swedes themselves would fill these jobs collided with reality: unemployment rose among vulnerable groups, while the systemic labor shortage slowed any recovery in GDP. As a result, Sweden emerged from the crisis more slowly than its European peers.

The current government’s tenure has caused Swedish voters to increasingly see the country’s top legislative body not as a forum for building national consensus but as a generator of chaos.

The entire machinery of state governance has been hijacked by the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), whose votes are mandatory for every initiative of Ulf Kristersson’s minority government from budget parameters to education reform. The public is becoming increasingly irritated as parliament openly disregards its long-standing unwritten rules of conduct, turning sessions into ideological battles. Instead of a functioning cabinet, citizens see a conglomerate of political appointees whose sole purpose is to hold on to their ministerial seats at any cost.

Ahead of the parliamentary campaign, the center-left coalition led by the Social Democrats has rolled out a sweeping program of counter-reforms as part of its effort to dismantle the right’s legacy and return the country to the classic principles of the Nordic model. The centerpiece of its economic program will involve launching large-scale state investment in infrastructure, green energy, and industrial revival.

The left plans to restore the financial stability of the regions by channeling targeted, multi-billion injections into municipal budgets to halt cuts in hospitals and schools. At the same time, it proposes introducing a progressive tax on excess income and large capital, as well as legally banning commercial companies from profiting off budget subsidies in education and healthcare, bringing these sectors back under strict state control.

On the issue of fighting street crime, the center-left is seizing the initiative from the right, proposing to tackle the root causes rather than the symptoms of the crime crisis. While acknowledging the need to maintain a strong police presence and effective prosecution of gang leaders, the left is shifting the focus toward prevention and social outreach.

Their strategy rests on large-scale funding for low-income suburbs, job creation for young people, and restoring state control over schooling in at-risk areas in order to cut off gangs’ channels for recruiting teenagers. The opposition promises to scrap the right’s most notorious innovations, such as warrantless preventive searches in designated security zones, which have arguably only embittered the population, undermining trust in the police. These will be replaced with targeted operational work and an expanded corps of municipal inspectors.

The migration issue in the left coalition’s platform has undergone a significant evolution: while there will be no return to the unrestricted refugee intake of 2015, the approach will be purged of the right’s xenophobic populism. The left promises to maintain reasonable border controls while completely scrapping the shameful “snitch laws” and vague “improper conduct” deportation criteria in order to bring Sweden’s migration policy back within the framework of international humanitarian law.

The main emphasis will be on genuine, rather than coerced, integration through the labor market. The center-left intends to lower the salary thresholds for foreign specialists that the right had artificially inflated, thereby easing the staffing crunch in IT and healthcare. At the same time, subsidized training and language-learning programs will be launched for permanent residents, transforming migrants from objects of police control into a full-fledged economic resource for the country.

Public opinion polls in August showed a steady lead for the center-left opposition bloc, led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. A Verian survey, commissioned by state broadcaster SVT, put support for the opposition bloc at 53.9% (which would guarantee the center-left 196 seats in the country’s 349-seat parliament), while the right-wing governing coalition polled at just 43.9%, projecting 153 seats. However, a Demoskop poll putting the balance of forces at 50.6% to 46.9% in the opposition’s favor may herald a more tight-run result.

The main mathematical problem for sitting Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and his coalition is the collapse of the Liberal Party. To enter the Riksdag, a party must clear a strict 4% electoral threshold. But the Liberals, led by Simona Mohamsson, have consistently teetered on the brink of political oblivion, polling between a paltry 1.9% and 2.4% in recent surveys. If the Liberals fail to clear the necessary mark, it will be mathematically impossible for the right to retain a parliamentary majority.

The Liberals’ decline accelerated after March 13, when Mohamsson signed the so-called “Swedish Promise” (Sverigelöftet) — an agreement with Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats. The move crossed the Liberals’ historic red line: Mohamsson publicly shook hands with the right-wing populist leader and agreed to bring his party into a future government as full-fledged cabinet ministers. 

The decision triggered an intra-party revolt, high-profile resignations of key figures, and a mass exodus of voters. Attempts to resuscitate the party by bringing back former leader Lars Leijonborg and through Mohamsson’s bold gestures at the debates on Aug. 17 failed to win over moderate voters. Public rejection of the Sweden Democrats remains consistently high: 56% of Swedish voters categorically oppose the right-wing populist party’s presence in the cabinet.

While the right-wing forces try to normalize the far right in order to hold on to power, Swedish women are clearly demonstrating their objections to this alliance: support for Åkesson’s party among women stands at just 12%, compared with 24.7% among men.

The Social Democrats, holding the lead with roughly 30% of the vote, depend in large part on the support of three forces: the socialists of the Left Party, the Greens, and the liberal Centre Party. But Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar categorically rejects the role of an obedient junior partner to the center-left and is demanding full ministerial portfolios for her party in exchange for votes. Despite resistance from the moderate wing at the party congress in Örebro in April 2026, Dadgostar firmly held her ground on the demand.

Meanwhile, another potential partner — the Centre Party, led by Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist — says it will never allow the Left Party into government. Thand Ringqvist, whose roots lie in small business, champions a platform of entrepreneurship and tax cuts, which directly contradicts the socialists’ plans to raise the tax burden on business. The Centre Party itself is teetering at around 5% in the polls, and Thand Ringqvist’s personal approval rating stands at a critically low 6%.

The pre-election dynamics are so complex that young political scientists from Rotterdam University have compiled an entire electoral map of Swedes’ group preferences. It shows who could have the greatest impact on the outcome of the vote. 

The study suggests that the voters who will decide the outcome of Sweden’s upcoming election may yet switch their preferences at the last minute.

On foreign policy, Sweden is showing a rare national consensus. Questions of NATO membership, support for Ukraine, and countering Russian hybrid threats have been effectively removed from the arena of interparty struggle.

Swedish society’s attitude toward the war in Ukraine and the threats from the Kremlin remains uncompromising. Opinion polls in recent years have recorded a consistently high level of Swedish anxiety over Russian aggression in the Baltic, as well as concerns about espionage and cyberattacks.

Against this backdrop, Swedes see military aid to Kyiv not as charity but as a direct investment in their own security. Voters harshly punish any flirtation with pacifist or isolationist rhetoric. As a result, even traditionally skeptical left-wing parties have had to adjust their platforms so as not to lose voters.

Ulf Kristersson’s ruling right-wing coalition is trying to claim full NATO integration as one of its primary achievements, reminding voters of its resolve at a moment of crisis. But the center-left opposition, led by the Social Democrats, stresses that it was their government that filed the alliance application in 2022, and that the course toward Euro-Atlantic integration is a cross-party achievement belonging to the whole nation — not a success the right can claim as its own.

The only remaining source of electoral tension in this area is the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD). Although the party’s leadership has officially adopted a pro-Ukraine and pro-NATO stance, the left-wing coalition has skillfully used the party’s history against it in the campaign. The Social Democrats regularly remind voters of certain SD functionaries’ past sympathies for the Kremlin’s style of governance and their ties to Moscow-sympathizing European right-wing populists. Given Swedish voters’ extreme sensitivity to any sign of hybrid influence, such reminders inflict serious damage on the right-wing bloc’s reputation and make citizens doubt the reliability of Kristersson’s far-right allies.

Whoever wins the upcoming vote — the center-left or the sitting cabinet — Stockholm’s course will remain unchanged, much to the relief of voters weary of domestic reform battles. No matter who wins, Sweden will continue to build up its defense budget, strengthen NATO’s presence in Northern Europe, and provide comprehensive military support to Ukraine. Everything else, however, will come down to the vote on Sunday.