Meet Sweden’s New Populist Kingmakers
STOCKHOLM—It wasn’t quite the populist surge that the experts predicted. But in Sweden’s election on Sunday, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats still managed to expand their influence, setting the stage for an uncertain government-formation process among the country’s eight political parties. After a tense and unusually divisive campaign focusing on immigration and crime, Sweden will now contend with a fractured landscape in which the center-right and center-left coalitions that have defined its politics for decades are deadlocked, and the populist party holds the balance of power in parliament.
While the center-left Social Democrats and the center-right Moderate Party, Sweden’s two dominant political entities, came in first and second with 28.4 percent and 19.8 percent, respectively, both parties saw a decline in their share of the vote on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Sweden Democrats’ third-place
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