Election September 2022
Sweden’s next general election is scheduled for 11 September 2022.
The Kingdom of Sweden is a constitutional monarchy with a freely elected multiparty parliamentary form of government. Legislative authority rests in the unicameral parliament (Riksdag). The king is largely a symbolic head of state. The prime minister is the head of government and exercises executive authority.
Sweden is a parliamentary democracy. This means there are no presidential elections, only parliamentary elections. Based on which party – or coalition of parties – that receives the majority of votes, the parliament appoints a prime minister who then forms the government. The last time one party got absolute majority was in 1968, when the Social Democrats received 50.1 per cent of the votes. To be assigned any seats in the Swedish parliament, a party must receive at least four per cent of the votes or at least 12 per cent of the votes in any of the country’s 29 constituencies. That’s why there are few small parties in parliament.
The parliament has 349 seats. After an election, the Election Authority distributes the seats proportionally, depending on the number of votes that each party has received. To make sure that the whole country is represented, the distribution of seats also takes into account the election results in each constituency. The largest constituency is the County of Stockholm, the smallest the County of Gotland.
After the 2018 elections, there were 188 men and 161 women in the Swedish parliament. That’s the highest share of women since the 2006 election: 184 to 165. And of the 21 ministerial posts in the current government, women occupy 11, including in the ministries of the ‘first order’ such as foreign affairs and finance. This excluded the prime minister – with him, Stefan Löfven, it was 11 men and 11 women.
Observers considered the general elections in 2018 to be free and fair. In January 2019 a center-left coalition led by Stefan Lofven of the Social Democratic Party assumed office. The 2018 general election left the parliament fragmented, with neither center-left nor center-right forces able to secure a majority. The Social Democrats control 100 seats in the 349-member assembly. The center-right Moderate Party has 70 seats, just eight more than the far-right Sweden Democrats. Political opponents decry the populist group over its neo-Nazi roots, although the party denies holding extreme views.
In Reporters Without Borders’ worldwide press freedom ranking for 2021, Sweden ranked third. The list is based on the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations have in each country, and the efforts that authorities make to safeguard this freedom. Many newspapers declare – in writing – which ideology they stands for. They can be socialist, liberal, independent, and so on, but an important note here is that it doesn’t affect the newspaper’s objectivity: objectivity is vital regardless of ideology. In other words, a socialist newspaper may well criticise the Social Democrats. The public broadcasting services SVT (Sweden’s Television, link in Swedish), Sveriges Radio (Sweden’s Radio, link in Swedish) and UR (the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company) offer a range of programs free from advertising. Most people also have access to several commercial channels and streaming services.
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