Swedes vote with the blocs inside a few points and the Centre holding the hinge

Swedes vote on Sunday for all 349 seats in the Riksdag with the two blocs inside a few points of each other and the Centre Party again in a position to decide who governs.

Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats remain the largest single party. Novus, polling 5,928 people between 9 and 11 September, put them at 28.6 percent. Demoskop, in a smaller sample ending the same day, had them at 29.7. The Sweden Democrats sit second in both surveys, at 19.5 and 19.0. Ulf Kristersson's Moderates, the prime minister's own party, are third, at 18.1 and 16.7.

Bloc arithmetic is tighter than those party figures suggest. Novus gave the Red-Green grouping 50.8 percent and the Tidö parties 47.8. Ipsos, interviewing 1,800 people through 10 September, put the gap at 0.3 points. Infostat had it at 0.8. Verian was the outlier on the other side, with a 5.6-point Red-Green lead. None of those surveys is a forecast of Sunday night. They do show why both camps spent the last week talking as if they could still lose.

Kristersson has said he wants the Sweden Democrats inside the cabinet if the right holds. Jimmie Åkesson has asked for several major ministries. That is the change from 2022, when the Sweden Democrats propped up the government from outside. The party's origins in the neo-Nazi milieu of the 1980s and 1990s remain a live argument on the left. On the right the argument is that four years of informal cooperation already happened and that cabinet seats would only make the arrangement honest.

Andersson has spent the campaign moving her party toward a harder line on migration, closer to the position taken in Denmark by Mette Frederiksen. The Social Democrats opened the year near 35 percent in some trackers and have come down. The cost of living, gang shootings and energy prices have sat at the centre of the debates. National security has as well. Sweden is now a NATO member. Both blocs say they will keep aid to Ukraine. Neither has offered a clean break on defence.

The Liberals nearly dropped out of the picture. In August some polls had them under the 4 percent threshold that decides whether a party enters the chamber at all. By this week Novus and Demoskop both had them at 4.7. If they stay above the line, Kristersson's path to 175 seats is difficult but not closed. If they fall under it, the right's sums get worse in a hurry.

The Centre Party is the other hinge. It polls around 7 to 9 percent and has spent the past four years outside both cabinets. The party has not signed a pre-election deal with Andersson. It has also refused to treat the Sweden Democrats as a normal partner. That leaves a familiar Swedish problem: a parliament in which the two blocs can each claim a moral majority and neither can lock one without a party that spent the campaign saying it would rather not choose.

More than eight million people are eligible to vote. Polls close in the evening. Preliminary counts usually arrive the same night. Seat projections use the modified Sainte-Laguë method. A majority is 175. Several late polls put both blocs short of that number on their own, which is why Sunday is likely to produce days of talks rather than a finished government.

The last election, in September 2022, gave the Tidö parties a narrow win after a campaign fought on crime and immigration. Four years later those issues have not left the agenda. What has changed is the Sweden Democrats' demand to sit at the table and the Social Democrats' decision to compete with them on migration rather than treat the subject as a moral quarantine. The voter who has to live with the result will get a government that looks, in either direction, more like a bargain than a mandate.

If Andersson returns as prime minister she will still need partners. The Left and the Greens want spending. The Centre wants fiscal caution and a distance from Åkesson. If Kristersson stays, he will have to decide which ministries go to a party that a large share of the country still treats as beyond the pale. The ballots do not resolve that argument. They only set the numbers in which it will be held.