Swedish PM resigns after right, far-right poll win

Stockholm, Sept 14 (AFP/APP): Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson on Wednesday announced that she would resign after an unprecedented right-wing and far-right bloc narrowly won Sunday’s election.

Out of the Swedish parliament’s 349 seats, the right-wing opposition was set to win 176, thanks in part to a surge by far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), with over 99 percent of districts counted.

Speaking at a press conference, Andersson, Social Democrats party leader, noted that it was a “narrow majority, but a majority nonetheless.

“So tomorrow I will hand in my resignation as prime minister, and the responsibility for the continued process will go to the speaker,” Andersson said.

Sunday’s elections were so close that tens of thousands of votes from abroad and those cast in advance had to be counted to validate the results.

– ‘Making Sweden great again’ –

Never before has a Swedish government relied on the support of the anti-immigration and nationalist SD, who became the big winners of the vote, by gaining more than three percentage points.

With 20.6 percent of votes counted so far the party emerged as Sweden’s second largest party behind the Social Democrats, which have dominated Swedish politics since the 1930s.

However, the post of Prime Minister will in all likelihood go to the leader of the Moderate Party, Ulf Kristersson, as SD leader Jimmie Akesson is unable to unite all four parties to head the government.

“I now begin the work of forming a new and strong government,” Kristersson said in a video posted to Facebook.

Kristersson, a former gymnast, led a major U-turn for his party when initiating exploratory talks in 2019 with the Sweden Democrats and then deepening their cooperation.

The Christian Democrats, and to a lesser extent the Liberals, later followed suit.

At the same time the thorny question remains of whether the far-right would be given cabinet posts, which Akesson said late Sunday was their “goal”.

In a post to Facebook on Wednesday, Akesson thanked “friends of Sweden”, around the country.

“Now the work begins of making Sweden great again,” the party leader said.

The Sweden Democrats rose up out of neo-Nazi groups and the “Keep Sweden Swedish” movement in the early 1990s, entering parliament in 2010 with 5.7 percent of votes.