Ulf Kristersson resigns after Sweden’s left bloc wins 176 seats to 173

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson submitted his resignation to the speaker of the Riksdag on Thursday after the final count confirmed that the centre-left opposition had won Sunday’s election. Magdalena Andersson’s bloc took 176 of 349 seats. Kristersson’s right-wing grouping took 173. The gap was about 50,400 votes in a country of roughly 10 million people.

Kristersson remains in office as caretaker until a new government is formed. In his letter he asked to be relieved so that the speaker could start talks at once. He warned that statements made before election day could make a coalition hard to build. After a resignation the speaker consults every party and proposes a prime minister. The chamber then votes. If four candidates fail, a new election must be called.

Andersson led Sweden as its first woman prime minister from 2021 until the 2022 defeat. She said voters had chosen a new direction after four years in which the Tidö government tightened policy on immigration and crime. She listed climate, schools, healthcare, elderly care and immigration as priorities and called for “a new era of cooperation between the political parties.”

The arithmetic is tight and the red lines are not. Andersson’s potential partners include the Centre Party, the Greens and the Left Party. Centre has said it will not sit in a coalition that includes the Left. The Greens are a possible member of a left-of-centre cabinet. Dagens Nyheter reported that the Social Democrats had invited other opposition parties for talks.

On the other side, Kristersson had planned to bring the Sweden Democrats into government with ministerial jobs if he won. The party, which has roots in the neo-Nazi fringe of the 1980s and 1990s, lost vote share for the first time since it entered the Riksdag in 2010. That drop, more than any single Social Democrat gain, flipped the chamber.

Government formation in Sweden is often slow. It took 37 days after the 2022 election and 134 days after 2018. Deputy prime minister Ebba Busch, leader of the Christian Democrats, said it remains to be seen what happens next. The election authority still has to certify the result over the coming days.

The policy stakes are concrete. The outgoing government made crime and migration the centre of its programme and relied on Sweden Democrat votes without giving the party cabinet posts. Andersson ran against that bargain. She now has to assemble 175 votes that can survive a confidence test without repeating the same dependence on a partner her own voters reject, or without the Centre Party walking away over the Left.

Kristersson’s resignation letter tried to set the tone for that process by asking every party to talk. Andersson’s first speeches tried to set a different tone: unity against division. Those two sentences will be tested in the speaker’s rooms, not on the campaign trail. The seat count will not change. The coalition math might.

For a reader outside Sweden the useful fact is the margin. Three seats and 50,400 votes ended a four-year right-wing experiment that had promised to bring the far right into cabinet and instead watched that party shrink. The next government, if Andersson can build one, will be equally narrow. That is the condition under which Swedish policy on migration, crime and welfare will now be written.