Published on 13 September 2026, election day, in Czech.
Sweden is electing a new Riksdag today, from 8:00 to 20:00 local time, which is the same as Central European time. All 349 parliamentary seats are up for election, for a four-year term (Next Swedish general election, Wikipedia). The final polls from the week before the election agree on only one thing: the race is undecided. The closest of them, by the Ipsos agency (fieldwork 7–10 September), estimates 175 seats for the opposition red-green bloc against 174 for the governing Tidö bloc – a difference of a single seat (Opinion polling for the next Swedish general election, Wikipedia).
This text was written before the election results were published, so the figures given are poll estimates, not facts about the actual result.
Five final polls, five different seat estimates
| Agency (fieldwork) | S | SD | M | L | Red-greens | Tidö | Seat estimate (opposition : government) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verian (4–10 Sep) | 27.6% | 18.1% | 15.8% | 5.5% | 51.5% | 45.9% | 185 : 164 |
| Infostat (5–11 Sep) | 26.3% | 20.2% | 17.3% | 4.5% | 49.6% | 48.8% | 176 : 173 |
| Demoskop (7–11 Sep) | 29.7% | 19.0% | 16.7% | 4.7% | 50.5% | 48.0% | 179 : 170 |
| Ipsos (7–10 Sep) | 27.4% | 18.8% | 18.3% | 5.0% | 49.3% | 49.0% | 175 : 174 |
| Novus (9–11 Sep) | 28.6% | 19.5% | 18.1% | 4.7% | 50.8% | 47.8% | 180 : 169 |
Source: aggregation of the five most recent polls according to Opinion polling for the next Swedish general election, Wikipedia, as of 11 September 2026. The red-green bloc consists of the Social Democrats (S), the Left Party (V), the Centre Party (C) and the Greens (MP); the Tidö bloc consists of the Moderates (M), the nationalist Sweden Democrats (SD), the Christian Democrats (KD) and the Liberals (L).
The red-green bloc has a slight lead in all five polls, but the range of seats – from 164 to 185 for the governing bloc – is too wide to settle anything on its own. The Social Democrats remain the strongest single party (26–30%), with the Sweden Democrats set to come second (18–20%) and the governing Moderates third (16–18%).
For the first time in history, the Sweden Democrats could sit in government
The Sweden Democrats (SD), today a nationalist, anti-immigration party, were founded in 1988 as the successor to the Sweden Party. According to research by the anti-racist outlet Expo, around 60% of the party's founders and early members had links to Swedish and foreign neo-fascist and white nationalist movements – among them the first SD chair, previously associated with the neo-Nazi movement, and the party's first auditor, a Waffen-SS veteran. From the mid-1990s, under new leadership, the party banned uniforms and fascist symbols and began expelling open extremists from its ranks; the turn, led by a reformist faction around the future party leader Jimmie Åkesson, culminated after 2005 in a change of logo and rhetoric (Sweden Democrats, Wikipedia).
Because of these origins, the rest of the political spectrum applied a so-called cordon sanitaire to SD from the moment they entered the Riksdag in 2010 – a policy of refusing any cooperation. It began to crumble only at the end of the decade: after the 2018 election the Christian Democrats announced they were willing to negotiate, and a year later Ulf Kristersson, then leader of the Moderates, met the SD leadership officially for the first time. The Liberals, the last of the four Tidö bloc parties, announced only this year that they no longer have any "red lines" towards SD (Sweden Democrats, Wikipedia).
After the 2022 election, in which SD came second with 20.54% (73 seats), ahead of the Moderates themselves (19.10%, 68 seats), the agreement reached at Tidö Castle secured only their support for the government from outside: Ulf Kristersson's cabinet was formally made up only of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, and SD were left without ministries (2022 Swedish general election, Wikipedia).
This year that could change for the first time. On 13 March 2026, the Liberals and the Sweden Democrats signed an agreement called "The Sweden Promise": if the Tidö bloc wins a majority, SD will receive government posts for the first time in the party's history. The agreement also includes a commitment to hold a referendum on adopting the euro, at the same time as the 2030 election (Next Swedish general election, Wikipedia).
The agreement, however, weighs on the Liberals in particular. In none of the five final polls did they rise above 5.5%, and they came closest to the 4% threshold with the Infostat agency – only 0.5 percentage points above it. So far they clear the threshold in all five polls, but with a margin so small that the polls' statistical error alone could wipe it out. If the Liberals failed to clear it in the actual vote, their votes would be lost when converted into seats, and the Tidö bloc would in effect lose them. SD leader Jimmie Åkesson told voters not to lend their vote to the Liberals if they had not reached at least 3.5% in the polls by 3 September.
The red-greens have a candidate for prime minister, not an agreement on government
On the other side, the red-green bloc has a clear candidate for prime minister but no consensus on what a coalition should look like. The Left Party has declared that it will vote against any government in which it does not get ministries of its own – a shift from the previous election, when it supported a Social Democratic minority government from outside without claiming any posts. The Centre Party, by contrast, wants a government with S, the Greens and the Christian Democrats, but refuses to sit in it together with the Left Party. According to Wikipedia, forming a government would require the votes of all four opposition parties, yet their demands are mutually exclusive (Next Swedish general election, Wikipedia).
That is also why the commentators cited on Wikipedia agree that even a clear red-green election victory would not in itself mean a government is formed quickly.
What is different from 2022
In many ways the election is a rematch of the 2022 contest: once again Kristersson and Andersson face each other, and once again a few percentage points will decide. In the meantime, however, Sweden joined NATO in March 2024 – this is the first parliamentary election since accession – and the governing coalition, with SD's support, has tightened migration policy to the point of a historically low number of residence permits granted. The question this election newly raises is not only who will win, but whether SD, after sixteen years in the Riksdag, will sit directly in government for the first time.
Neither official nor preliminary results are available at the time this text is published – polling stations close at 20:00 CEST. The figure in the headline is an estimate from the final pre-election poll, not a result; we will add the actual data once it is available.
