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Recent polls have been a sad reading for the ruling Tidö parties of Sweden. While they have been performing badly in general, a recent major survey, published yearly by the Swedish central bureau of statistics, however shows that the right wing still has a decent grip on the countryside. The Tidö parties are neck-to-neck with the left wing in many more rural counties, but have a shortfall in major urban areas that is typical for conservative politics. This rarely makes or breaks an election campaign for the right wing, as it is a common phenomenon across the democratic world that urban voters tend to be more progressive. In an increasingly urbanised society like Sweden however, there may come a point where this delicate balance between the cities and the countryside is broken.
Previous independent polls conducted in Gothenburg and Malmö show that the left is virtually unchallenged in Sweden’s second- and third-largest cities. In a city like Malmö, which has seen all but uninterrupted Social Democratic-dominance for the past century, this is nothing new. For a city like Gothenburg, it is more worrying. Gothenburg is a left-wing nest in its own right to be certain, but it has seen a few shifts of power throughout its 20th-century history. Those may belong to history now, when the left, according to local polling, appears to have completely taken over.
Several magnitudes more alarming is the most recent state-conducted polling in Stockholm. Once the ideological home of the Swedish political bourgeois, the capital of Sweden has turned almost blood-red in its leanings. The numbers for 2026 are four points worse than in the preceding year, earning the Tidö parties a collected record-low 31,6 percent (!) of the Stockholm vote.
The reliability of polling
The Swedish statistics agency produces its surveys annually, and its poll numbers are highly regarded in the press as an accurate gauge for the political sentiments of Swedes. The reasons why appear to be largely superficial. There is a special kind of legitimacy to a highly professional and impartial government institution’s work, which understandably sets it apart from the tabloids’ and even the morning newspapers’ own polls. One strength is the Bureau’s high standard for number of respondents; while most poll conductors base their material on around one thousand persons, the Bureau reaches out to 10 000. A major drawback for the reliability of the answers is that it is a phone survey, which may deter conservative voters in particular from submitting truthful answers about their sympathies.
Regardless, with its consistent methods, the statistics bureau’s polling shows that the Moderates and the Sweden Democrats have lost two whole points each in Stockholm. However their true numbers measure up in relation to the parties on the left, this is a significant drop that should be taken seriously.
Social trajectory stacked against conservatism
Sweden has traditionally not been geographically segregated when it comes to politics. The wholly proportional election system allows all parties a decent shot at growing whether it is among urban or rural voters, as even very small parties will have a fair chance at establishing themselves in the major cities, becoming part of the political landscape. This creates a normalising effect that lowers the threshold for a person to vote for said party, unlike what happens in other types of electoral systems, with majority-vote constituencies. In the United Kingdom as well as the United States, the cities are dominated by progressive and left-wing forces, while the countryside is dominated by more conservative forces.
Due to a number of factors, Sweden is seeing a development towards this kind of polarisation, and away from political pluralism in the cities. The leading cause is naturally immigration; migrants, particularly from non-European backgrounds, tend to vote left-wing, and they tend to concentrate in major urban areas. Another is that the needs, values, and priorities of most people tend to change somewhat with an urban upbringing. As urbanisation carries on in Sweden, there is an increasingly smaller proportion of the population that lives outside of the cities, skewing the political landscape to the left.
A factor in the unbalanced relationship between countryside and city is that Swedish politics are generally considered to have neglected the needs of the country’s rural areas. Urbanisation rates are high in Sweden, and many rural municipalities are struggling economically with lack of opportunities, ramping welfare costs, all while they are shrinking population-wise due both to aging and to moving trends. All the downsides of living in rural Sweden are driving more and more people away from smaller towns towards the larger cities. The rural population, which may be culturally inclined in various ways to vote conservatively, is becoming smaller each election cycle, while the crammed urban centers are still growing.
There is a “positive” effect of this development for the right wing, in that stagnating rural communities tend to embrace oppositional sentiments to mainstream politics. The nationalist Sweden Democrats draw much nourishment from small towns in the Swedish interior, where they have often grown just as large, or even larger than, the previously dominating Social Democrats. The Social Democrats have in many regards effectively surrendered the rural vote to the Sweden Democrats, while looking for greener pastures in the cities.
This is not a unique experience compared to the rest of the democratic world, of course. As previously stated, the standard in Western Europe and North America is that the cities lean overwhelmingly progressive, while the countryside in turn becomes deeply conservative. The social divide between urban and rural inhabitants becomes overtly political, and this may now be happening in a way rarely seen before in Sweden’s democratic history.
This is not to reject the basic explanation of why the right is losing – they have been governing the country for four years, and have had to take many necessary but perhaps uncomfortable actions. The Tidö government has popped the progressive and social liberal bubble by actually taking hard measures against illegal immigration, against economically damaging labour immigration, against foreign criminals, and gang violence. The upset for the left wing has been tremendous, and this has led to the left mobilising in a way the right has not been able to. In a way, these remarkable four years of the right wing decidedly changing the course of Sweden has caused the formerly centre-right-voting urban progressives, of which there were many during the 2010s, to realise that they do not belong on the right; they belong on the left.
Can the right ever win back Stockholm?
In many countries, the right barely puts up a fight in the major cities. In the United States, it is customary for presidential candidates to make recurring visits to ‘swing states’, where the razor-thin margins between the Democrats and the Republicans can make or break an election. The right knows that it cannot win over the urban voters in sufficient numbers to influence the outcome of an election, so the campaigning tends to be geographically concentrated.
The right wing in Sweden has been trying to court urban voters through various means for several years. In 2022, it is said that the Moderates lost their female urban voters to the Social Democrats. Much effort has since been spent on winning them back, by dialing back certain types of anti-socialist rhetoric, and taking strategically pragmatic positions on contentious rural-urban issues such as wind power and climate policy. This has so far only earned them the ire of many rural voters.
The Sweden Democrats have on occasion made similarly ‘uncharacteristic’ policy decisions, such as banning certain semi-automatic firearms from being used for hunting, which caused a stir in the party and exposed the rural-urban conflict even in the Sweden Democrats.
The reward from urban voters? Nowhere to be seen.
Assuming that the polling reflects reality, should the right wing simply abandon their attempts to please the major city voters? An argument could be made that Sweden needs major political parties that lean into the rural-urban divide, or at least face progressive urban voters without apologising for their realist stands on crime and immigration.