Sweden Democrats close in on back-door Riksdag entry: poll

The far-right Sweden Democrats need just 8,000 more votes to gain a spot in the Riksdag, according to a new poll.

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The additional votes would give the party more than 12 percent of the votes in a single voting district, crossing another threshold allowing them to send a representative to Sweden’s parliament.

The figures come from a semi-annual study carried out by the Synovate polling firm and published in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

The most widely watched threshold a party must cross in order to gain representation in the Riksdag is one which requires a political party to achieve at least 4 percent of the vote nationally.

But a party can also gain a spot in parliament of it receives more than 12 percent in a single district.

No party has yet to achieve parliamentary representation through the single district threshold.

However, the Sweden Democrats currently have support of 8.1 percent of the voters in the lower Skåne voting district, in Sweden’s far south, which includes the communities of Burlöv, Kävlinge, Lund, Sjöbo, Trelleborg and Vellinge.

According to Synnovate’s calculations, support from an addition 8,000 voters would be sufficient to allow the Sweden Democrats to send a representative to the Riksdag by crossing the single district threshold.

The study is based on 12,000 interviews from Synovate polls taken in recent months.

A look at 2006 election results, however, shows that the Sweden Democrats received 5.3 percent of the vote in the district, or 11,272 votes.

Assuming the same voter participation rate of 84.5 percent for 2010, the party would need 25,000 votes – or 14,000 more votes than it received in 2006, to reach the 12 percent threshold.

“It’s true they need to increase by 14,096 votes, but that assumes that nothing has happened. But the party has increased to 8.1 percent in the voting district, which is a statistically significant increase since 2006, of from the 14,000 votes they need, they’ve already got 6,000,” said Synovate’s Nicklas Källebring.