Sweden's centre-Left opposition, led by former prime minister Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats, looked set to return to power after a knife-edge general election, dealing a setback to the hard-Right Sweden Democrats who had hoped to secure their first-ever cabinet posts. A win for Andersson's bloc would mark a reversal of the rightward shift seen under incumbent Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's coalition, which had overseen some of Europe's toughest asylum rules after years of relatively open immigration policy.

With more than 90 per cent of votes counted, Andersson's Left-leaning bloc was projected to win 176 of the 349 parliamentary seats against 173 for Kristersson's four-party coalition, a margin of just 0.45 per cent of the overall vote. The Social Democrats remain Sweden's largest party on roughly 28 per cent, while the Sweden Democrats, founded in the 1980s by Nazi sympathisers before becoming the country's second-largest party in 2022, were projected to lose around 11 seats. Officials cautioned that hundreds of districts and overseas votes still needed counting, recalling a similar false alarm in 2022, and warned that forming a government could prove complicated given divisions among potential coalition partners such as the Centre Party and the Left Party.