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Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced his resignation on Thursday after the centre-left opposition secured 176 seats in the 349-seat Riksdag compared with 173 for his right-wing alliance, a Reuters report indicated following completion of the vote count from Sunday’s election. The Swedish Election Authority placed the centre-left bloc, led by former prime minister Magdalena Andersson and her Social Democrats, on 49.6 percent of the vote against 48.8 percent for the governing parties and their partner the Sweden Democrats. Only around 50,000 votes separated the two sides in a nation of roughly 10.6 million people, according to tallies published by both Sveriges Radio and The Local.
Kristersson, who has led the Moderate Party since 2017, posted a letter to parliamentary speaker Andreas Norlén on the social media platform X in which he requested to be relieved of his duties so that talks on forming a new government could begin at once. “It is now the speaker of parliament who will lead the next steps on the path towards forming a new government. In order for this work to begin immediately, I hereby request to be relieved of my duties as prime minister,” Kristersson said in the statement also carried by Xinhua. The result remains subject to formal certification over the coming days, a point emphasised in dispatches from both Bloomberg and Reuters.
The Sweden Democrats, which had provided parliamentary support to Kristersson’s minority government under the Tidö Agreement since 2022, recorded their first decline in support since entering parliament in 2010, dropping about three percentage points from the previous election, SVT and Bloomberg assessments found. During his four years in office Kristersson oversaw Sweden’s accession to NATO, raised defence spending and tightened migration rules to the lowest level of asylum-related permits since 1985, according to a Wikipedia compilation of public records cross-checked with reporting by The Guardian. The right-wing bloc had promised the Sweden Democrats cabinet positions if it retained power, a pledge noted across multiple outlets including The Local.
An analysis published by The Conversation traced how the Tidö Agreement enabled the most comprehensive overhaul of Swedish migration policy in modern history, with reforms covering asylum, family reunification, citizenship and access to benefits that took full effect in 2025 and 2026. Government figures released in 2025 indicated asylum applications had fallen by nearly 60 percent since 2022 while returns of rejected applicants rose by more than 60 percent, shifting Sweden from one of Europe’s highest per-capita recipients of asylum seekers in 2015 to one of the lowest a decade later. Kristersson’s administration also expanded preventive police powers, contributing to a drop in shootings from 390 incidents in 2022 to 147 in 2025, the same official data showed.
In a Politico interview conducted days before the election, Kristersson warned that a centre-left victory could jeopardise Sweden’s NATO commitments because two of the four opposition parties had voted against membership and might struggle to deliver the required domestic decisions on spending and missions. Sweden formally joined the alliance in March 2024 after a rapid shift from long-standing neutrality, a process Kristersson completed by delivering the accession instrument in Washington, according to his government’s published timeline. The outgoing prime minister argued that a divided government would be unable to sustain the monthly NATO-related decisions his cabinet had managed since accession.
Opposition parties now face their own negotiations to construct a workable coalition or minority administration, with the Social Democrats taking 99 seats as the largest single party on 28 percent of the vote, Xinhua figures show. Political commentator Mats Knutson told Swedish Television that taxation, sick-pay rules and nuclear power represent significant areas of disagreement among the four centre-left and centrist parties, a point relayed in the Xinhua dispatch. Parliament could hold a vote on a new prime minister as early as Sept. 29 once the speaker completes consultations with party leaders, according to the timetable outlined by BGNES and Reuters.
