The coalition of left-wing parties in Sweden has seemingly prevailed over the governing conservative bloc in a victory facilitated by mass migration.
Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported on Wednesday that the opposition parties are 99.9 per cent likely to have won the general election, with the votes of just 50 districts left uncounted. While the tabulation of early votes had swayed the result back and forth, it appears to be a statistical inevitability that Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Tidö government was defeated.
According to SVT’s projections, the left-wing opposition parties led by the Social Democrats (S) are likely to win 176 seats in the Riksdag, compared to 173 for the right-wing bloc led by Kristersson’s Moderate Party (M).
While such a slim margin of victory may make governing difficult, with an agreement between the Green Party (MP), Left Party (V), and Centre Party (C) not even a certainty, observers have noted that the left-wing group would not have been even close to victory without the impacts of mass migration on the Nordic nation.
Exit poll data has demonstrated that the potential governing Social Democrats and the radical Left Party (V), formerly the Communist Party of Sweden, were significantly favoured by migrant voters.
Among non-European migrant voters, the Social Democrats received 37 per cent of the vote, and the Left Party won 21 per cent. This is compared with 13 per cent for the Moderates and just 10 per cent for the anti-mass-migration Sweden Democrats (SD).
The two top left-wing parties also enjoyed a significant advantage among European migrants living in Sweden, 29 per cent of whom backed the Social Democrats and 10 per cent for the Left Party, for a total of nearly 40 per cent. This is compared to 19 per cent for the Moderates and 14 per cent for the Sweden Democrats.
Conversely, were the election confined to native Swedes, the right-wing bloc would hold an advantage, with the Moderates winning 20 per cent and the Sweden Democrats at 18 per cent. While the Social Democrats still won 27 per cent of the Swedish vote, the Left Party saw a noticeable drop-off at just 7 per cent.
Combining all factions, the four right-wing parties would have won 51 per cent of the vote, compared to 48 per cent for the left-wing parties, were the election confined to only Swedish-background voters.
Perhaps most strikingly, estimates from SVT indicate that the razor-thin margin of victory for the left may have been overcome by the right, without migrants being granted citizenship, under Kristersson’s conservative government. While the government did reduce immigration and even saw migration briefly turn net negative, it still granted over 200,000 citizenships during its four-year term.
Although there is no specific exit poll for migrants granted citizenship under Kristersson, SVT calculated that if they had voted along lines similar to those of their broader migrant groups, it would likely have been enough to secure the left-wing parties’ current margin of victory.
Some areas of the country were particularly impacted by the migrant vote, including in the infamous multicultural hub of Malmö. According to a preliminary count of the vote, the heavily migrant Rosengård Centrum area of the city saw 95.2 per cent of the vote go either to the Social Democrats or the Left Party. Moderate Party MP Fredrik Kärrholm quipped in an article detailing the influence that migration had on the vote that such a result “might have made Saddam Hussein jealous.”
Should the left-wing bloc successfully form a government in the coming weeks, they are likely to seek to reverse many of the immigration restrictions implemented by the Kristersson government, potentially making future victories for conservative parties even more difficult.