What to know about Sunday's election in Sweden, NATO's newest member

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden is holding an election on Sunday that will determine whether a conservative leader remains in charge and a hard-right party wins ministerial jobs for the first time, or whether the center-left returns to power.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is seeking a second four-year term at the helm of the European Union nation that is also NATO’s newest member . His predecessor hopes to win the job back. The question of who will govern has taken up more space than actual policy issues.

More than 8 million people in the nation of about 10.6 million people are eligible to vote in the election for the 349-seat parliament in Stockholm, the Riksdag, which will elect the next prime minister.

Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relies on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party that has far-right roots but has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority. If the right is re-elected, it can expect Cabinet posts this time.

He's up against Magdalena Andersson of the center-left Social Democrats, a party that more often than not led Swedish governments since World War II. Andersson served as prime minister from 2021 until she lost power at the last election.

Experts say the campaign has been fragmented and incoherent, with policy questions such as how health care should be organized drowned out by the question of which parties will be able to put together a government.

“Crime has come down, inflation has come down. So these topics are not really what people discuss," said Zeth Isaksson, a sociologist in electoral behavior at Stockholm University. "People discuss who is going to be in government, and that’s what the election is about.”

There are two major political blocs: one with four parties on the right and another with four parties on the left. So the big question is not so much which party wins as which side can put together a majority. Individual parties need a minimum 4% of the vote to win parliamentary seats.

On the face of it, “it would be a sensation if the opposition parties, having been ahead in the opinion polls pretty much for four years since the last election, didn’t now win a majority,” said Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University.

But he said that an “extremely defensive” campaign by the Social Democrats may have cost them some support, leaving some voters wondering why they should support the party. The right-wing bloc's hope of convincing voters that it's more united than its rivals may have had “a little impact,” he added.

One significant thing is different in this election. The Sweden Democrats, who in 2022 took 20.5% of the vote to become the biggest party on the right, can expect Cabinet seats if power doesn't change hands.

Kristersson announced in April that his conservative Moderates would allow them into government if the right has a majority — though he would remain prime minister, even if the Sweden Democrats are the stronger party.

The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by people who had been active in right-wing extremist groups, including neo-Nazis. They toned down their rhetoric and expelled openly racist members under Jimmie Åkesson, who has led them since 2005 and overseen their growth from what was once a marginal party.

“There’s some, I won’t say fear, but trepidation, apprehension about the possibility of Sweden Democrat ministers,” Aylott said, and the Social Democrats recently have tried to exploit that.

But even as parties on the populist right gain elsewhere in Europe, for instance in a far-right triumph in a weekend state election in Germany, the election may reinforce the impression that the Sweden Democrats “have peaked to some extent,” Isaksson said.

Not so much. “The biggest threat to Sweden’s security is from the war in Ukraine and there is almost complete consensus in Sweden about support for Ukraine and deep antipathy towards Russia,” Aylott said.

Sweden's Psychological Defense Agency said that the country's election isn't Russia's top priority, as that broad support reduces the incentive for Moscow to interfere.

However, just over a week before the election, Expo magazine published a report alleging that a civil servant working in parliament for the Sweden Democrats had spread Russian state narratives on social networks. She is the partner of the head of the party's coordination office with the government, Gustav Gellerbrant.

Gellerbrant said her posts were taken out of context and were meant as irony and sarcasm. He said he decided to go on parental leave to avoid shifting the focus of the election campaign.

Kristersson, who said that “there is no room for pro-Russian narratives in Sweden," welcomed that decision.

After decades of post-World War II neutrality and centuries of broader nonalignment with major powers, Sweden joined NATO in 2024 as the trans-Atlantic military alliance’s 32nd member. The move to join was initiated by Andersson's government after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and completed under Kristersson.