Voters give the lowest rating to this year's election campaign

The dust has barely settled after the election campaign when politics now enters a new phase. The campaign has been put aside and the parties will instead try to get together a government that can govern the country for the next four years.

When DN/Ipsos asks voters how they view the completed election campaign, the rating is low. Just over four out of ten voters believe that the election campaign was bad, while only 13 percent respond that it was good. At the same time, almost half of the voters believe that the election campaign was unfair, while only one in ten experienced it as factual.

The election movement has never before received such a weak rating in DN/Ipsos' surveys that have been ongoing since 2006.

- This is a very clear result and shows that the voters think that the parties devote themselves more to getting on each other than telling them what they themselves want, says Nicklas Källebring, opinion analyst at Ipsos.

According to the survey, two-thirds believe that the parties have almost exclusively or mostly engaged in criticism and attacks on their political opponents. Only a fraction of the respondents believe that the parties mostly devoted themselves to telling what they themselves want to push for politics.

- A risk with this development is that it damages trust in the political system. It can be more difficult to get people to get involved in party politics if the perception is that it is mostly about attacking the opponents instead of one's own politics, says Nicklas Källebring.

At the same time, he points out that there is a paradox connected to the measurement result. Despite the fact that voters are clearly dissatisfied with the way the parties conduct their election campaigns, turnout does not decrease, on the contrary, it increases.

- You could have otherwise expected that, says Nicklas Källebring.

The MP sympathizers are the ones who give the lowest rating to this year's election campaign, closely followed by left-wing parties and the Sweden Democrats.

- The climate was not discussed to any great extent in the election campaign. The Green Party tried to bring in the issue, but the only thing about which there was a little more debate was the fuel prices, says Nicklas Källebring.

He explains that voters' ratings of the election campaign are falling, among other things, with social media playing an increasingly important role in the parties' communication. There, the pitch is often higher than in traditional channels.

- Then it is also a classic election strategy to scare the voters with what awaits if the opponents win. The promises you make to the voters you have to take responsibility for after election day, while you don't have to do it to the same extent for the attacks on the opponents, says Nicklas Källebring.