The Swedish election received coverage that might be considered disproportionate to Sweden's size, no doubt due to the natural connection with various narratives about xenophobia, Brexit, Trumpism etc. Based on pessimism and a number of disconcerting polls close to the election, many domestic and international observers expected the xenophobic socially-conservative (and spectacularly incompetent) Sweden Democrats to become the second-largest party at around 20% of the vote. Betting markets reflected this belief as well, and the average of polls had them hovering around 20%. Major news outlets around the world posted increasingly bizarre analyses of the political aspects of the election, clearly based on misunderstandings of other European elections, as well as worried screeds about Europe falling to far right activism. I myself could not believe my own low estimate of 17.9%, and instead thought it would be 19.7% or around 22%--probably the latter.
Suffice to say almost everyone was wrong: SD won 17.6% of the votes and came in at third place. That's not good, but it's much better than expected. They made substantial gains in some municipalities and counties and at least 25 of their candidates at those levels have been forced to resign after revelations about grotesquely racist statements online. There will be a lot of discussion about why everyone was wrong but I suspect journalists and pols will swiftly move on without learning anything, while online pollsters will be scratching their heads for a long time to come.
The major exit poll indicates that nearly half of Swedes who voted in the last election changed their vote in this one, but this finding should be taken with a pinch of salt. Other surveys indicate that more than half decided their vote in the final week. This is interesting because SD made some big mistakes in the final two weeks. In one of the last debates, their leader came across as more overtly racist than he had ever before in these situations, giving some of the other party leaders an excellent opportunity to demonstrate their strong principled opposition to his views. More foolishly, they made an announcement that they do not support dual citizenship, because they hadn't considered that many of their supporters are either immigrants themselves or are married to immigrants. They immediately announced that they would make an exception for Swedish citizens from other Nordic countries, but that was clearly a half-assed attempt at damage control and also indicated they'd misread their voters (because they hadn't thought about how many non-Nordic immigrants might have considered voting for them).
All is not well, obviously. A far-right party made significant gains and now there is a great deal of electoral uncertainty as to whether or not the centre-right coalition will use SD's support to topple the current PM and govt. Two of the coalition members have previously said they would not do such a thing, but the leader of the largest coalition member, as well as the leader of the insane evangelical Christian Democrats, have in the past couple of weeks been ambiguous--and yesterday demanded the resignation of the PM when it looked like the two coalitions would have 143 seats each. Now they're behind by two seats, which might change everything.
Anyway, I'm in a good mood. My municipality and country resisted pretty strongly.
