Sweden’s center-left political parties squeaked to victory in elections this week, according to results released Thursday, making the country one of the first in Europe to tap the brakes on the far right’s seemingly steady march toward power.
Voters cast their ballots Sunday, but the contest was so tight that it took days to count the last stray votes before a conclusion could be reached.
The next prime minister is likely to be Magdalena Andersson, leader of Sweden’s stalwart center-left party, the Social Democrats, though experts predicted that there could be weeks of sticky negotiations before the next government is announced.
As in other parts of Europe, Swedish nationalists had made big gains in recent elections by railing against migration and blaming migrants for crime.
This election showed that in Sweden at least, the far right, which was essential to the outgoing center-right coalition’s hold on power, had become a victim of its own success. Experts said the country had cracked down so decisively on crime and migration that it essentially took those issues off the table.
“The general sense is crime is now under control; migration is now under control,” said Lisa Pelling, the director of a progressive research group in Stockholm.
The consequence, she said, is that “people want something else from the government.”
Polls before the election showed that voters were prioritizing healthcare and education, issues that tend to favor the left.
According to the election results, the center-left won 49.5% of the vote, compared with 48.8% for the center-right. That gives them a slight edge in parliament: 176 seats to 173. The turnout was characteristically high, at 85%.
Andersson, a familiar face, was chosen as Sweden’s first female prime minister a few years ago and served as finance minister before that, when her Social Democratic Party dominated Swedish politics.
If she can hash out a government in the coming weeks, it is likely to embrace many of the positions the party had pushed before, including what it called a “feminist foreign policy” that prioritized reproductive freedom and got into tangles with Saudi Arabia over its treatment of women.
But forming a government won’t be easy. Sweden’s center-left is a real mishmash. It includes a formerly communist party and a pro-business one influenced by farmers. Parts of the coalition have already voiced doubts about working with each other.
And Andersson’s Social Democrats are coming into this as a weakened force, having earned just 28% of the vote, one of their worst performances ever.
Social democratic parties across Europe have lost ground to right-wing parties that present themselves as the new protectors of the working class, said Ann-Cathrine Jungar, a political scientist at Sodertorn University in Sweden.
“What is noteworthy about this election is that socioeconomic issues were their home turf, and yet they were unable even to maintain their support,” she said of the Social Democrats.
Part of the explanation, Jungar said, may be that center-left politicians have themselves moved toward tougher positions on immigration and crime, driven by the far-right Sweden Democrats, the biggest loser in this election.
The Sweden Democrats have tried hard to distance themselves from their neo-Nazi roots. But in this election, they went from being the second-most popular party to the third, going from 20.5% of the vote in the last election to 17.5% this time. It was the party’s first significant erosion of support since it roared onto the scene in the late 1980s, which could raise questions about its future.
Jonas Hinnfors, a political scientist at Gothenburg University, said Swedish society was growing uncomfortable with the extreme positions the far right has been advocating on migration, such as deporting large groups of lawful migrants, including teenagers. That is too extreme for most Swedes, Hinnfors said, and many people in Sweden have come to appreciate how important migration is for their labor market.
“There is a kind of developing consensus that immigrants are needed,” he said. “And that is not where the Sweden Democrats are.”
He doesn’t expect the far right to evaporate. But he said this election was “a big blow to them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.