Quick facts
Party name in Swedish: Sverigedemokraterna
Leader: Jimmie Åkesson
Current number of seats in parliament: 70 (was 73 after '22 election)
Vote share in the last election (2022): 20.54 percent
Part of the current governing coalition? Yes (pretty much)
Current ministerial posts: None
2026 election slogan: Vi gör Sverige till Sverige igen ("We're making Sweden like Sweden again")
Party background
The party was formed in 1988 by former members of the far-right Sweden Party (Sverigepartiet), and former members of the far-right group Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish), both of which contained neo-Nazi elements. The party's first official chairman was Anders Klarström, who chaired the party between 1989 and 1995, during which period it was part of the extreme right.
Mikael Jansson, a former Centre Party politician who took over as chairman in 1995, began to expel the more militant, racist and antisemitic elements. But it was only when Jimmie Åkesson took over as chair in 2005 that the process of normalisation began to accelerate.
The party now claims to be socially conservative rather than far-right (many critics disagree), and to have an ideology of "cultural nationalism", where skin colour or ethnicity are irrelevant, and it is possible for immigrants to become culturally Swedish so long as they fully embrace Swedish culture.
Since 2012, the party has claimed to have a zero-tolerance approach to racism and extremism within its ranks, with several prominent members expelled for antisemitic or racist posts on social media.
The party first entered the Swedish parliament in the 2010 election, with a 5.7 percent share of the vote, and has grown its vote share in every election since, in 2022 overtaking the Moderates to become the second largest party in the Swedish parliament after the Social Democrats.
The Tidö agreement it then signed with the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals, has allowed it to essentially set Sweden's immigration programme for the last four years, and also gave the party's officials positions in Sweden's government offices.
Key priorities in the 2026 election
The party's overriding goal is to get ministers in the government for the first time. This is more important than any individual policy. If the party wins a smaller share of the vote than it did in the 2022 election, this will be seen as a setback, especially if the Moderate Party overtakes it to once again become the largest party on the right.
What are their positions on key issues?
We have based the following sections on the issues The Local's readers told us in a survey earlier in 2026 that you were interested in.
Immigration
The party stressed that Swedes have "the right to feel at home in their own country, to live normal Swedish lives and to have their culture, language and traditions respected". Swedishness, however, is "open to anyone who wants to be a part of it", so long as they show "loyalty, responsibility and adaptation".
The Sweden Democrats have over the last four years driven through what Åkesson has described as a "paradigm shift" in immigration policy, and Åkesson has himself said during the campaign that this means there are fewer pressing migration reforms it wants to drive through.
Among the concrete pledges it has made in the election campaign are:
- revoking existing permanent residency permits
- include anti-Swedishness or svenskfientlighet in hate crime laws
- give neighbourhoods a veto on new developments to prevent tvångsblandning, or "forced ethnic mixing"
The party's immigration spokesperson Ludvig Aspling told The Local he also wants Sweden to establish so-called "return hubs" in non-EU countries, a proposal to make immigrants' benefits payments contingent on fulfilling a language requirement, and a crackdown on unscrupulous construction firms' use of cheap, often illegal, non-EU labour.
The economy and cost of living
The economy is where Sweden Democrats' policies most diverge from those of the other parties in the right-wing bloc.
The party is vehemently opposed to plans for market-based rents in newly constructed apartment buildings and says this is a red line in any government negotiations.
It also says it will not accept "any deterioration in unemployment insurance funds" or a-kassa. In the long term, the party wants to nationalise Sweden's system of unemployment insurance.
It is also in favour of ending the first unpaid day of sick leave (karensavdraget), one of the opposition Social Democrats' main election pledges. Unlike the Social Democrats, the Sweden Democrats want to do this only for staff in elderly care, healthcare and preschool, who have little choice but to stop working if they are feeling a bit sick.
Despite these left-wing positions, the party is showing signs of veering to the right economically, not least with its proposal for a toned down version of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The proposed minister for efficiency would seek to cut waste and bureaucracy in the public sector, streamline the missions of government agencies, audit the finances of municipal and regional governments, and end misdirected subsidies.
The party also wants to reform the equity markets, changing rules on short positions, Market Abuse Regulation, and the publication of insider information.
Finally it wants to reform the Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen), "with a focus on increased efficiency and clear results".
Healthcare
Perhaps the party's most far-reaching election pledge is its proposal to expand the recently introduced enhanced high-cost protection for dental care, where the patient only pays 10 percent of the reference price for most treatments, so that it covers all adults.
The party has also pledged to improve the quality of food in old people's homes, and to increase the amount of money disabled people get to fund personal assistants at the same time as indexing it to inflation.
Climate
The Sweden Democrats are the party in Sweden which comes closest to outright climate change denial, with party leader Jimmie Åkesson recently playing down the importance of this summer's forest fires in France and Spain.
"I think it mostly seems to have created concern among the establishment and the media elite. I don't think ordinary people are particularly worried about it," Åkesson said.
The party wants to establish what it calls Jimmiepriser, or "Jimmie prices", by totally abolishing the biofuels obligation. It wants to protect regional airports like Bromma Airport in Stockholm, abolish state subsidies for wind power, and turn the E20 into a motorway between Gothenburg and Stockholm.
The party supports the effort to build new nuclear power stations in southern Sweden.
Crime, security and defence
On crime, the Sweden Democrats have in recent years been heavily focused on combatting pedophilia, and have pledged to introduce a public pedophile register and a state-run, interactive pedophile map, so that parents can know if there are people who pose a risk to children in the area where they live or plan to move.
If the left-wing bloc is elected, the party warns, the constitutional amendment making it illegal to be a member of a criminal gang, which needs to be voted through twice, once on either side of an election, will not be enacted.
The party wants to reduce the cost of Swedish prisons by making prisoners share rooms, reducing the cost and quality of the food, and making criminals work to pay for part of the cost of holding them while also hiring out more cells overseas.
Education
The party dropped its opposition to government-funded private schools, or free school, in the run-up to the 2018 election, and now firmly believes in school choice and letting private companies operate schools for profit.
It wants to raise the status of teachers, give them better working conditions, reduce their paperwork, and increase the requirement that they be qualified. It wants to change the school law so that schools are allowed to insist on school uniforms. Finally it wants there to be both a meat option and a vegetarian option at every school meal.
Which of the other parties will they work with?
During the election campaign, the Sweden Democrats' leader Jimmie Åkesson has sought to distance himself and his party from the rest of the right-wing bloc, stressing that unlike them, the Sweden Democrats are "not a centre-right party". The word he used was borgerlig, which in Swedish has class connotations, meaning both "centre-right" and "bourgeois".
Åkesson has also called on his voters not to vote tactically for the Liberals, even going so far as to advise Liberal supporters to vote for another party.
In its rhetoric the party has tended to attack both the Moderates and the Social Democrats for their liberal immigration policies of the 1990s and 2000s, and in 2025, Magnus Olsson, who leads the party in Malmö city council, went so far as to argue that the left-wing Social Democrats were the party's "natural partner".
For now, though, only the Moderates, Christian Democrats, and the Liberal Party are willing to enter a coalition with the Sweden Democrats. There is a small chance of the Centre Party dropping its opposition to cooperation. It's also possible that the Social Democrats would do a deal on specific issues, but not on forming a new government.
What are their chances?
The May poll from Statistics Sweden, which is widely seen as the most reliable estimate of voter opinion, estimated the party's support among voters at 18.3 percent, down more than two percentage points on the 2022 election result.
All the polls since the campaign started have continued to estimate the party's support slightly below what it achieved in 2022, but the party has historically outperformed the polls in elections.
Some commentators now argue that the party has already given up on a victory for the Tidö parties and is instead campaigning to maximise its own share of the vote – even if this means scaring centrist voters over to the left-wing bloc.
In this analysis, it will benefit the Sweden Democrats if the Liberal Party is eliminated from the parliament and the Moderate Party loses seats in parliament.
This is the seventh article in a series taking a deep dive into the eight Swedish parties' election platforms. We've based the series on the issues The Local's readers told us in a survey earlier in 2026 that you were interested in. The last party guide article was on The Moderates.
Keep following The Local to stay on top of the Swedish election.
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