Polls
Opinion polling in the week leading up to the 2026 Swedish election has indicated an extraordinary comeback for the right-wing parties, which have lagged behind the left-wing bloc in polls since shortly after the election in 2022.
In May, the highly respected pre-election poll from Statistics Sweden gave the four opposition parties a massive 12-point lead. In two polls this week, from Ipsos and Infostat, this lead had sunk to 0.3 percent and 0.8 percent respectively.
At the same time, the Liberal Party, which was still at 2.2 percent in an Indikator Opinion poll in the middle of last week, has been above the 4 percent threshold in each of the last eight polls of the campaign.
None of these polls, it has to be pointed out, gives the government parties an actual lead, but it is so close that the two blocs are statistically neck and neck.
It's worth noting, however, that the right-wing bloc was only ahead in one out of the seven polls published in the last week of the 2022 campaign and went on to narrowly win the election.
Nicholas Aylott, associate professor in politics at Södertörn University in Stockholm, said it was important to take opinion polls with a pinch of salt.
"It's almost impossible to say because every election, one or more of the opinion polls gets it a bit wrong, so then they conclude that the electorate has maybe changed its composition or its willingness to answer questions, or the way it consumes information, and then it tries to compensate for the inaccuracy.
"But, of course, over the coming years new sources of inaccuracy can grow up. The safest thing to do is to take an average, a poll of polls, but even then, you have to be cautious. There's just no way of knowing how how accurate or inaccurate any particular poll, or even the polls in general, have been."
8pm: Exit polls
The first exit polls, SVT's VALU poll and a rival poll carried out by Novus for TV4, come at 8pm.
VALU, which was first launched in 1991, is carried out by researchers at the University of Gothenburg and is based on interviews with 10,000 to 15,000 voters outside polling stations across the country.
It's a very solid poll and usually gives a good idea of how the election has gone. But it’s important to remember that it is still only a poll.
In 2022, the TV4 exit poll gave a 50.6 percent majority to the Social Democrats, Left Party, Centre Party and Green Party, and SVT exit poll gave them a lead of 49.8 percent to 49.2 percent, meaning they would get 176 seats to the right-wing bloc's 173.
In the event, the results were reversed and the right-wing parties got 176 seats to the left bloc's 173.
It can also go the other way: in 2018, the Social Democrats received a catastrophic 26.2 percent in the SVT exit poll, but turned out to have received a less humiliating 28.3 percent once all the votes were counted.
"They usually pick it right, but there's always a little bit of slippage, a little bit of a gap between the actual result and the projected result," Aylott said. "The 2022 election was in a sense nothing unusual, because the gap between the projected result and the actual result wasn't that big, but it just happened to tip the balance."
"In a tight race, as Sweden's elections have often been in the last couple of decades, even a small inaccuracy can can upset the conclusion drawn from any particular poll."
9.15pm: SVT forecast
This year, for the first time, SVT is also publishing a valprognos, or election forecast, based on a mathematical model of all of Sweden's 6,626 election districts, which it will use to predict the result based on the first few hundred districts to complete their vote counts.
The result, which SVT expects to be published around 9.15pm, has, the broadcaster estimates, less than a 0.2 percent chance of being wrong once 500 out of 6,500 districts have been counted.
"This means that the odd mandate could end up in the wrong place, which means you should be careful of drawing conclusions from the forecast if the result is very tight," Fouad Youcefi, SVT's main election day presenter, explained.
But he also said the forecast would still be much more reliable than an opinion poll or an exit poll.
We will find out if he is right later tonight.
10.30pm to 11.30pm: Preliminary results
At around 10.30pm, the Swedish election authority starts to publish the first preliminary results, usually publishing the first figures when a thousand or so districts have been counted.
These results should also be treated with caution, Aylott said, as results can be heavily skewed by the districts that are quickest to deliver results and delays in counting early votes and postal votes from overseas voters.
The early results might over-represent Norrland, where the Social Democrats are dominant, or perhaps Skåne, where the right-wing parties are over-represented.
In 2022, the left bloc was in the lead when the first 1,500 districts had been counted at shortly before 10pm, only for the right-wing parties to catch up over the night, overtaking shortly before 11pm.
Although a victory for the right-wing bloc looked likely by the time Ulf Kristersson and Magdalena Andersson made speeches at around 1pm, it was still too uncertain, even then, for either to declare victory or concede defeat.
We could be in for a long night.
Comments