With a slight twist on a biblical quote, 2026 could go down in history as the year a party declared dead was resurrected on the third day before the election.
Without the opinion institutes' figures, the Liberals would be helplessly lost. Rarely have so few had so many measurements to thank for so much. If the party survives in the Riksdag when the votes have been counted, it does not depend on its own politics. Today's Liberals are like a shell - largely emptied of their own voters. The election spurt is based entirely on voters who prefer other parties - but who vote tactically.
Never before have we seen a party leader openly admit that she cannot get enough people to like her party's policies. And who unabashedly asks sympathizers of other parties to make up for the shortfall by lending their votes - in exchange for her promising to implement the policies of the other parties. "Do you want Ulf Kristersson? Do you want Jimmie Åkesson's politics? - then vote for me!"
The Liberals are reduced to a tactical parking lot for other parties' voters.
In recent years, the party's political actions have been completely taken over by game thinking. In the 2022 election campaign, the survival strategy was to promise voters a moderate-led government - but without the Sweden Democrats. When the party leadership this spring turned around and embraced the Sweden Democrats, it was not because the SD had changed, but to once again adapt the Liberals' offer to the political game plan.
Jimmie Åkesson has also played hard in the opinion polls. Like a right-wing circus director, the SD leader has tried to tame the voters - either swinging his stick at the Liberals, or swinging it at the Christian Democrats. Åkesson's swinging is an advanced operation where he wants to prevent SD sympathizers from helping L but at the same time hopes to drive M and KD voters to switch to Simona Mohamsson. The calculation is that Åkesson will emerge from the election as an unthreatened leader of the right.
It has swung wildly in the voter surveys - where some have shown an impregnable lead for the opposition, others have indicated a dead race. At one point, the institute's figures for the Liberals varied between one and four percent. The figures for other parties have also differed considerably. The opinion institutes usually emphasize that they only give a snapshot and cannot predict the election. But even the moment seems to be curiously elusive.
The debate about the usefulness of voter surveys has already begun and will gain more momentum after the election. Not only because they struck so differently, but also because in this year's election they were so clearly able to be used as political tools. At times, the numbers have completely taken over the political debate about Sweden's future.
Election campaigns have been likened to a marathon - the difference is that whoever wins immediately after the finish also has to complete an 800-meter race, i.e. the grueling laps that lead to the formation of a government.
If V and MP increase in the election, the right's warnings about a "left turn" may come true - the Social Democrats' government basis will then be left-leaning. On the other hand, a Tidö victory would give Sweden a historically right-wing government. Never before has Sweden been governed by a coalition that is dominated by parties that – like SD and KD – are ideologically to the right of the Moderates.
If the opposition wins, Magdalena Andersson has announced that she intends to invite all parties except SD to talks about a future government. Andersson's game is to show the voters that she is trying to unite the country and that it is the opponents' responsibility if they decline the invitation. But there is also hope that talks with Ebba Busch can force the Left Party to back down from its demands for government participation.
The Social Democrats have spun hard against V in the last week - Nooshi Dadgostar has no chance of getting a place in Magdalena Andersson's government, it has been said. Magdalena Andersson has said that the party has a "long journey to go" before it becomes fit for government.
The spin rests on a misconception about how governments are formed.
It is not Magdalena Andersson or Ulf Kristersson who decide which parties are allowed to sit in the government, nor is it the Center or other smaller parties - but the Riksdag. The composition of the Riksdag after the election becomes a mathematical fact that no government-former can talk away from, and whoever wants to form a government must relate to the majorities they can muster. That's what government leaders have done so far and that's what they will do this time too.
If you don't get the one you love, you have to love the one you get, as Andersson's representative Göran Persson once said about the Left Party.
