A Commentary on the Swedish Post-Election Debate and Far-Right “Imported Voting Livestock” Discourse, by Tobias Hübinette — 18 September 2026

On 13 September, Sweden held national, regional and local elections. A centre-left red-green alliance led by the Social Democrats and their leader, Magdalena Andersson, won by a slight margin of only around 50,000 votes. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who had formed a right-wing coalition government after the 2022 election that depended on Sweden’s far-right party, the “Sweden Democrats” (SD), has now resigned. SD differs from most other far-right parties in Europe in that it has Nazi and fascist rather than right-wing populist roots; in 2022, having won 20.54% of the vote, it became the second-largest party after the Social Democrats.

In this election, SD — which had almost doubled its vote share in every election since first entering the Swedish parliament in 2010 — lost ground for the first time in a parliamentary election, receiving 17.5% of the vote. This meant SD also lost its position as Sweden’s second-largest party, a position reclaimed by Kristersson’s own liberal-conservative party, the “Moderate Party”. Because Kristersson’s right-wing coalition government had always been fully dependent on SD — which was, at the time, larger than the Moderate Party — SD had been able to transform Sweden’s formerly generous migration policy into the EU’s most restrictive one.

However, SD was not able to tighten the rules governing the acquisition of Swedish citizenship until the end of Kristersson’s term, when a citizenship test was introduced. As a result, around 150,000 adult immigrants became new Swedish citizens between 2022 and 2026. The vast majority of them are non-Western immigrants, primarily from sub-Saharan Africa and the SWANA region, and likely mainly Arabic-speaking and Muslim — a statistical fact that has now become a highly contested topic in the post-election debate.

Already during the election campaign, SD’s long-time leader, Jimmie Åkesson, said in the final televised leaders’ debate, two days before the election, that Muslims might well decide the outcome — and that this would be the first time immigrants had done so. It is well established that non-Western immigrants and their children have voted heavily for the Social Democrats over the years, and partly also for Sweden’s reformed former Communist party, the “Left Party”.

As it became increasingly clear that Andersson’s red-green alliance had won the election, albeit by a narrow margin, several senior SD politicians began explaining the defeat by pointing to the 150,000 new Swedish citizens, claiming their votes had decided the outcome and that the Social Democrats had “imported” non-Western and Muslim immigrants. A radio interview with the notorious SD politician Kent Ekeroth went viral after he described these new, primarily non-white, Arabic-speaking and Muslim voters as “voting livestock” (röstboskap in Swedish). Several other senior SD figures, such as Tobias Andersson, have also echoed this highly racialised language, calling non-Western immigrants “voting livestock” and claiming that the Social Democrats had “imported” them as future voters for the party. 

It is true that many, if not most, non-Western immigrants tend to vote for left-wing parties across Europe. But the idea that the Swedish Social Democrats consciously “imported” non-white and Muslim immigrants according to a secret master plan to exploit them as “voting livestock” is nothing more than a variant of the great replacement conspiracy theory.

At the time of writing, representatives of Kristersson’s own Moderate Party have also reproduced this denigrating far-right “livestock” discourse — for instance, MP Fredrik Kärrholm — and it is clear, reading between the lines, that some SD representatives are even questioning non-Western immigrants’ right to vote in future elections. The great fear is that Sweden’s right-wing parties will never again be able to win an election because of the immigrants the Social Democrats are accused of having “imported” as “livestock” as part of a sinister plan. The bitterness of having lost the election on 13 September, combined with the right-wing bloc’s inability to attract non-Western immigrant voters, has together produced a paranoid post-election atmosphere of conspiracy theories among the Swedish far right — one that bodes ill for the future of an already hyper-polarised and divided country.

Tobias Hübinette is a Swedish researcher in critical race and whiteness studies who has also monitored and followed the far right since the 1990s.

This article first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.

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