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PaperclipPerfector
5d ago
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Transnational Thursday for September 10, 2026
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Notes -
My sources pre-election were saying that this would come down to whether or not the Liberals (right-liberal in theory and practice) crossed the 4% threshold to get seats. So an outcome where L comfortably exceeded the threshold, but the right-wing coalition still fell short is surprising.
My perspective on this election is that it is a (rare) case of a coalition between the establishment right and right populists that didn't blow up harming both sides. (See for example my post about last year's Dutch elections). Instead the right-populists lost votes to the centre-right - even the Liberals will gain seats, despite tanking in the polls and a noisy minority of L supporters saying that forming a government relying on SD support was a betrayal of liberal principles. Although the narrative may well end up being "the voters punished the coalition" because they went from having just enough seats to govern to falling just short.
What happened? As a liberal elite, even a temporarily embarassed one, I obviously want this to be a case where the government was simply more competent than other right-populist coalitions because SD did not take cabinet seats. As far as I can see, this is roughly correct. You can make a lot of progress on crime and immigration by (a) wanting to and (b) being quietly competent without doing any of the flashy stuff that right-populist voters want to see, and the Swedish coalition did. This doesn't get you actual right-populist votes, but if you are able to take the credit it gets you the votes of people who were previously holding their nose and voting right-populist because the alternatives were so awful. (Even left-wing parties can do this, as we have seen in Denmark, and even in the UK although neither the right nor the left wants this widely known).
Final thought - this is probably going to come down to <0.25% of the vote between the left and right blocs. Nobody thinks that Sweden can't count an election to that level of accuracy, and an attempt by the losing side to attack the integrity of the election is not going to succeed.
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