In this ECPS interview, Assistant Professor Sofie Blombäck examines the Sweden Democrats’ electoral setback alongside the continuing normalization of ideas long associated with the radical right. She argues that some voters may feel they have already “gotten what they wanted” on migration, even as SD itself remains partly stigmatized. Dr. Blombäck also highlights a darker post-election development: debate over whether Sweden’s newest citizens, particularly Muslim immigrants, are treated as legitimate political actors. “In my personal view, the debate has become quite ugly,” she says. More broadly, she situates the election within a changing party system shaped by normalization, bloc realignment, strategic voting, weakened parliamentary norms, and shifting boundaries of political legitimacy.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
Sweden’s 2026 general election has brought into sharp relief a paradox that has been developing for more than a decade: the Sweden Democrats (SD) may lose electoral ground while continuing to shape the ideological and policy environment in which other parties compete. In this interview, Assistant Professor Sofie Blombäck, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Mid Sweden University, examines this paradox through the lenses of radical-right normalization, party-system realignment, political stigma, representative democracy, and the changing relationship between voters and political elites. Her analysis places particular emphasis on the extent to which ideas associated with SD have become embedded in mainstream political competition even as the party itself continues to carry a degree of stigma.
Dr. Blombäck argues that some voters who previously turned to SD because they wanted tougher migration policies may now feel that “they have now gotten what they wanted,” since the current policy direction has been “heavily influenced by the Sweden Democrats.” In her view, this helps explain how an electoral setback can coexist with deeper ideological influence: restrictive migration policies have become sufficiently entrenched that voters may no longer need to support SD itself in order to secure them. At the same time, she stresses that normalization remains incomplete. Although “the cordon sanitaire is gone,” and the stigma surrounding SD “is not as universal as it was four years ago,” the party is “not quite fully accepted into the mainstream.”
The interview’s most striking discussion concerns the post-election controversy over immigrant participation and the political legitimacy of Sweden’s newest citizens. Dr. Blombäck notes that rising turnout in socioeconomically vulnerable areas with significant migrant populations has been portrayed by some actors on the right as threatening. This, she argues, has shifted debate toward a more fundamental question: whether immigrants, “and especially Muslim immigrants,” are treated as “a potential problem or legitimate political actors.” Reflecting on the tone of the post-election debate, she states plainly: “In my personal view, the debate has become quite ugly over the past week or two.” She adds that Sweden is “a country of immigrants,” and warns that political mobilization which questions the legitimacy of such citizens as political actors carries particularly significant implications.
Beyond immigration, Dr. Blombäck situates the election within a broader restructuring of Swedish party competition. She argues that the party system has “tilted diagonally” along the GAL–TAN dimension, while the composition and ideological content of Sweden’s traditional blocs have changed. The result, she suggests, is not simply polarization, but a transformation in how parties compete, cooperate, stigmatize one another, and define the boundaries of political legitimacy in contemporary Sweden.
