When the right-wing Tidö coalition government came to power in 2022, it pledged to crack down on unskilled and asylum migration in favour of high-skilled labour migration. So how did Swedish media coverage of an issue that dominated the government's agenda in its four years at the helm look like?
Using its own AI-based text-analysis system, FAME, The Fix Advisory & Research analysed news articles, opinion pieces and editorials published by 11 Swedish media outlets between the 2022 and 2026 elections.
"Across four years, our archive contains more than 2.1 million articles from 11 Swedish outlets. Our FAME analysis system identified 26,389 articles in which migration was a substantive subject," its creator Miraslau Chyhir told The Local.
The analysis found that relatively few articles focused on immigrants themselves. Only between around 3 and 13 percent of articles about immigration in the analysed news outlets focused on the human story, in other words a story built around the experience of someone directly affected, rather than simply including a brief quote or no quotes at all from an immigrant.
Most of them instead centred ministers, government agencies, political parties or experts.
"By 2026, only about one in 18 migration articles was built around a human story. Personal experience appeared in the coverage, but politicians and institutions usually shaped it. The focus had also moved towards deportation and enforcement," Chyhir said.
"For a debate so closely tied to people’s lives, their voices were rarely at its centre."
The analysis also found that around two-thirds or more of the immigration coverage in the 11 outlets analysed was conflict-driven, or negative in general, and the conflict increased every year in the run-up to the 2026 election.
The analysis also looked at how much news sites covered immigration stories, showing a peak in early 2026. That coincides with teen deportations becoming a big story in the Swedish media.
Looking at each individual year, migration coverage peaked in 2022, before decreasing in the years between the two elections and then again rising to almost the same level in 2026.
The analysis also shows which politicians received the most coverage in relation to migration issues in the past four years.
Unsurprisingly, Migration Minister Johan Forssell was heavily featured in articles during the latter half, as well as his predecessor Maria Malmer Stenergard in the early half. Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also received a lot of attention in relation to migration issues, compared to some of their counterparts.
Looking at which parties shaped migration coverage, the Sweden Democrats were the focus of more articles than any other party in every single year since the Tidö government came to power.
The top topic in migration coverage was deportations and enforcement. The analysis doesn’t state in detail what those articles were about: they can include everything from heartbreaking stories about teen deportations to interviews with politicians about cracking down on illegal immigration.
It also shows that despite Sweden approving fewer than 2,000 first-time asylum applications in, for example, the year 2025 (plus just over 9,000 under the EU's Temporary Protection Directive for Ukrainians), the news sites in the analysis still focused more on asylum migration than labour migration (for which Sweden approved almost 23,000 first-time work permit applications in the same year).
Despite Sweden’s decision to reform its citizenship laws in 2026, citizenship received relatively little coverage in the media compared to other immigration topics. Deportations and integration, on the other hand, received more coverage.
The chart below breaks down the topics in several outlets’ migration coverage. Note that the results for smaller outlets, particularly Dagens ETC, may appear distinctive because they are based on relatively few articles, so it should not be used to draw broad conclusions.
When migration is the story, it is usually tied to crime or employment, the analysis shows. Issues such as welfare, housing, education, municipal service and public finances follow fairly far behind.
This did however differ quite a lot depending on which of the 11 outlets you were reading, with the TV4 broadcaster linking immigration and crime far more often than public radio broadcaster SR. Note that the chart does not imply that an outlet reported that migration causes crime.
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