Kristersson resigns after the left takes 176 of 349 Riksdag seats

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson asked the speaker of the Riksdag on Thursday to relieve him of office after the last postal ballots confirmed that the four-party left bloc had won 176 of 349 seats. His own grouping, the Moderates plus the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and the Sweden Democrats, took 173. About 50,000 votes separated the two sides in a country of 10.6 million people.

Kristersson posted the letter on X. He wrote that pre-election statements by the parties would complicate every possible government and that the speaker should start talks at once. "Constructive openness from the parties" was now required, he said. The Swedish Election Authority finished the preliminary count on Thursday. Formal certification is due this weekend.

Magdalena Andersson, who led the Social Democrats to 99 seats and about 28 percent of the vote, is the largest single party leader in the new parliament. She previously served as prime minister until the 2022 election. In a speech posted on Instagram she said Swedes had "voted for a new direction for our country, voted for unity and against division." She named climate policy, schools, healthcare, elderly care and immigration as the file she intends to open first.

Her partners are the Left Party, the Centre Party and the Greens. Those four parties do not agree on tax. After the 2022 vote it took 37 days to form a government. After 2018 it took 134 days. Parliament cannot vote on a new prime minister before 29 September. The speaker will sound out all eight parliamentary parties before putting a name to the chamber.

The campaign turned on whether the Sweden Democrats would enter cabinet. Kristersson, a Moderate, had governed since 2022 with outside support from the party founded in the 1980s by people with Nazi ties and later rebranded around immigration and crime. This year he promised them ministerial jobs if the right won. The bet failed. The Sweden Democrats fell from second place to third, dropped about three percentage points from 2022, and lost 11 seats, finishing on 62. It was their first decline in a general election since they entered the Riksdag in 2010.

Andersson used that offer as her closing argument. She told voters not to hand executive power to a party that the centre-right had once treated as untouchable. The result leaves the Sweden Democrats with fewer seats and no ministers, and leaves Kristersson arguing that Andersson's own red lines will make a stable 176-seat majority hard to run.

Sweden's system is built for this kind of arithmetic. Two blocs of four parties each have been the usual pattern. Minority governments are common. The speaker's first task is to test whether Andersson can hold her four parties on a budget and on migration without losing a confidence vote. If she cannot, the speaker can try another name, including a Moderate who would need votes the Sweden Democrats no longer command in the same volume.

Kristersson spent four years tightening migration rules with Sweden Democrat votes from outside cabinet. That record will sit on the table when Andersson starts talks. So will NATO membership, which both blocs now treat as settled, and energy prices that have risen with the Iran war. None of those files is decided by a three-seat margin. The margin only decides who writes the first draft.

Final numbers may still move by a seat when overseas and late postal ballots are certified. They are unlikely to flip the bloc result. The practical question in Stockholm on Friday is how long the speaker's rounds will last, and whether Andersson's 176 holds once the parties that campaigned together have to share ministries.