Sweden woke up on Monday without a result. With 94.4% of Sunday’s votes counted, the Swedish Election Authority’s early-morning update gave Magdalena Andersson’s centre-left opposition 176 of the 349 seats in the Riksdag and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s four-party alliance 173. The margin had been a single seat, 175 to 174, a few hours earlier, when more than 5,800 of the country’s roughly 6,600 polling districts had reported and a late surge on the right briefly put the governing bloc within reach. Counting of postal ballots and of votes cast at Swedish embassies abroad begins on Wednesday, and the authority does not expect to publish the final distribution of seats until the end of the week. Nothing in the numbers below is definitive.
The preliminary count nonetheless tells a clear story about the parties even if not yet about the government. Andersson’s Social Democrats remain the largest party but fell to 28.1%, down 2.2 points on 2022 and their weakest score in more than a century, for 100 seats. Kristersson’s Moderates rose slightly to 19.9% and 70 seats. The Sweden Democrats, the largest party on the right four years ago at 20.5%, dropped almost three points to 17.6% and 62 seats, and slipped to third place behind the Moderates. The Left Party gained to 8.2% and 29 seats, the Centre Party took 7.1% and 25, the Christian Democrats 6.2% and 22, the Greens 6.1% and 22, and the Liberals — who had polled below the 4% threshold for most of the parliament and whose survival was the campaign’s recurring arithmetic problem — cleared it comfortably at 5.4% and 19 seats. All eight parliamentary parties are back in the chamber, which is why the outcome is being decided by three seats rather than by a threshold accident.
Two blocs, two arithmetic problems
Andersson told supporters after midnight that the outcome was “even” but that “right now we are leading and if this holds up, Sweden will get a new government.” Her difficulty is that 176 seats are spread across four parties whose conditions do not fit together: the Left Party has said it will vote against any government in which it holds no ministries, and the Centre Party has said it will not support a government that includes the Left. Kristersson, for his part, called the closeness of the result “complicated,” said he would contact the other party leaders, and argued that “there is a very clear non-socialist majority, or non-left-leaning economic majority in the Swedish parliament” — a formulation that points at the Centre Party, and at some arrangement across the bloc line, rather than at a rerun of his 2022 coalition. “We are not in a hurry,” he added. Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats said simply that “we will not know tonight.” The Liberals’ March agreement with the Sweden Democrats, which would have given Åkesson’s party cabinet posts had the right won a majority, is for the moment moot.
The 2022 precedent is the useful calendar. Sweden voted on 11 September that year; the newly elected Riksdag convened on 26 September and Kristersson was not voted in as prime minister until 17 October, after the Tidö Agreement had been negotiated. A three-seat result that depends on postal votes and on reconciling the Centre and Left parties is unlikely to be faster. For anyone dealing with the Swedish state, the practical assumption is a caretaker government into October.
What it means for Swedish capital in Portugal
Sweden is the largest Nordic investor in Portugal — NorthSouth HQ’s directory counts some 260 Swedish companies and about €3.1 billion of investment, from IKEA, H&M and Volvo to Securitas, Verisure and Essity’s Lisbon shared-services hub — and none of those positions turns on which bloc forms the government. What does turn on it is the bilateral file that NorthSouth HQ flagged on Sunday: Sweden’s double-taxation convention with Portugal was terminated with effect from 1 January 2022, and no replacement has been negotiated since. The termination was carried through by a Social Democrat finance ministry in which Andersson held the portfolio; a government she leads is unlikely to reopen the question quickly, and a caretaker period puts it on hold in any case. Swedish groups with staff on Portuguese payrolls, and Portuguese professionals employed by Swedish companies, continue to operate without a treaty for the foreseeable future.
A second consequence is tone rather than law. The Sweden Democrats’ fall to third place removes, for now, the prospect of a party with an anti-immigration platform taking ministries for the first time — the scenario that Jornal de Notícias reported Portuguese residents in Sweden were uneasy about on Saturday. Portuguese citizens in Sweden move under EU free-movement rules that no Swedish government can change unilaterally, but the recruitment of Portuguese engineers, health workers and technicians by Swedish employers has always depended on Sweden being seen as a place worth moving to. A centre-left government would not reverse the outgoing government’s tightening of non-EU work permits — the Social Democrats campaigned on a restrictive line of their own — but the climate around the debate changes with 17.6% in a way it would not have with a Sweden Democrat cabinet.
What it means for Portuguese exporters to Sweden
Portuguese goods exports to Sweden reached €107.3 million in July, up 30.3% year on year according to INE’s country tables, and the institutions that carry that trade are indifferent to the count. Systembolaget’s autumn launches proceed on their published dates — Pormenor’s Douro white on 18 September, Quinta do Portal’s Mural on 25 September, Kopke, Graham’s and Campolargo on 2 October — and public procurement notices keep appearing on TED whoever occupies Rosenbad. The pause that matters is at the political level: decisions on the state budget for 2027, on defence procurement and on energy policy wait for a government, and a caretaker ministry cannot open negotiations on anything as slow as a tax treaty. For Portuguese suppliers to Swedish public buyers, and for the defence and infrastructure companies that have treated Sweden as their most predictable Nordic market, the next month is one of waiting rather than risk.
The economic differences between the blocs on the questions that touch the corridor were ones of degree: the right favoured further business-tax relief from a 20.6% corporate rate, the left more public investment, and the Social Democrats did not promise to reverse the nuclear programme. Kristersson’s reference to a “non-left-leaning economic majority” is a reminder that the Centre Party, whichever government it ends up supporting, holds the balance on economic policy, and that the likeliest outcomes cluster near the centre.
The corridor view
Three seats, a Wednesday count and two blocs with internal vetoes add up to the outcome NorthSouth HQ described on Sunday as the most likely: a weeks-long interval in which Sweden has an election result but not a government. For the corridor the substantive files — the missing tax treaty, labour migration, the competition for energy-hungry capital between northern Sweden and Sines — are exactly where they were on Saturday, and will stay there until a prime minister is elected. What has changed is that the version of Sweden with the Sweden Democrats in cabinet, the outcome Portuguese observers watched most nervously, is now the less probable one. NorthSouth HQ will return to the result when the postal and embassy votes have been added later this week.