In 2018, Sweden's current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson personally assured a Holocaust survivor that he would never work with the Sweden Democrats. On Sunday, he's asking voters to hand that same party ministerial posts in his government. Not a metaphor. That is just what happened.
The Promise, and What Became of It
According to Reuters, Kristersson made his assurance to Hédi Fried, a Holocaust survivor, not some anonymous pollster. It was a named person, a named pledge, and a very specific moral line in the sand. Eight years later, the line is gone.
The Sweden Democrats, who will now receive cabinet positions if the right-wing coalition wins another term, openly acknowledge that figures in their early history had connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. The party has spent two decades under leader Jimmie Åkesson trying to sand that history down. Expel the loudest extremists. Reframe the image. Talk about welfare and crime instead of racial purity. It has worked, which is either a story about political rehabilitation or about how far the Overton window can be yanked before it comes off the hinges entirely. Depends who you ask.
Kristersson's coalition currently depends on the Sweden Democrats from outside the cabinet. That arrangement, CBS News reports, already gave the party substantial influence over immigration and crime policy without the formal accountability of holding actual ministerial offices. Now Kristersson wants more seats, a majority government, and has decided that inviting the Sweden Democrats all the way inside is the price of getting there.
How a Fringe Party Became the Second Largest in the Country
The Sweden Democrats first entered parliament in 2010. By 2022, they were Sweden's second-largest party. That is not a slow drift. That is a structural collapse of the old political consensus, accomplished in roughly a decade.
The consensus that collapsed was called, essentially, a cordon sanitaire — an informal agreement among Sweden's established parties that the Sweden Democrats were too toxic to treat as a legitimate political partner. As CBS News reports, that firewall held until it didn't, and then it was gone fast. What broke it was a combination of real social upheaval and effective political branding.
Sweden took in around 163,000 asylum applications during the 2015 European migration crisis, according to CBS News. For a country of fewer than 11 million people, that was among the highest per-capita rates on the continent. What followed — gang shootings, bombings, a national debate about integration and segregation that got very loud and very charged — gave the Sweden Democrats a decade's worth of material. Police figures show shootings fell from 391 in 2022 to 158 in 2025, a real and significant drop. But in politics, the fear of a thing outlives the thing itself by years. The Sweden Democrats understood that. They surfed it.
The Trick That Actually Worked
What makes the Sweden Democrats genuinely interesting as a political organism, beyond their grim origins, is how they put their coalition together. Andreas Önnerfors, a professor of intellectual history at Linnaeus University, told CBS News that the party fused typical right-wing positions with policies aimed squarely at working-class voters — social security, benefits, the kind of protections that traditionally belonged to the left.
"That makes sense among ordinary people," Önnerfors said. It really does, and that's the uncomfortable part. You don't build a party from neo-Nazi fringe to second place in a Nordic social democracy by accident. You do it by figuring out which anxieties aren't being addressed by the establishment and planting your flag there. The Sweden Democrats found the gap between Sweden's self-image as a tolerant, egalitarian, low-crime society and the lived reality of communities where that promise felt like it had stopped applying to them.
Political scientist Niklas Bolin at Mid Sweden University told CBS News that the party's support is "particularly strong among men, working-class voters and voters outside the larger cities." That demographic profile should sound familiar to anyone who has watched similar movements in France, Italy, Germany, or across the Atlantic.
Sunday's Vote, on a Knife's Edge
The race is genuinely close. An Indikator Opinion poll conducted September 2 through 10 put the center-left coalition, led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats, at 50.8 percent. The right coalition sat at 47.6 percent, per CBS News. That is not a comfortable margin for anyone.
Here's the thing: even the center-left has moved. Bolin told CBS News explicitly that the shift toward more restrictive immigration and crime policy "is not limited to the parties on the right" and that the Social Democrats have moved in that direction too. So the Sweden Democrats' legacy isn't just their own electoral rise. It's the realignment of the entire political spectrum around the issues they forced to the center of the debate. They won that argument regardless of what happens Sunday.
If the right coalition wins, a party that traces its roots to Sweden's extreme-right fringe will hold executive power in a NATO member state for the first time. If the left wins, the Sweden Democrats will still be the second-largest party in Sweden, still holding massive influence, still waiting. There's no version of Sunday where they lose.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at the Sweden Democrats' rise and see a story about successful moderation — extremists who came in from the cold, cleaned up their act, and earned their place at the table through democratic competition. Prime Minister Kristersson is basically selling that story right now. It is worth taking seriously that parties change. It is also worth remembering that Kristersson was selling a completely different story to a Holocaust survivor eight years ago, and the thing that changed wasn't the Sweden Democrats' character so much as their poll numbers.
The broader pattern here matters as much as the Swedish specifics. Across Europe, the playbook is the same: start at the fringes, get called unacceptable, wait for the establishment to fail to solve the problems you've been shouting about, watch your numbers climb, and eventually become too big to exclude. At that point the center-right faces a choice between losing power and making you their partner. They keep picking partnership. Italy did it. France flirted with it. Now Sweden. Each time it happens, the next country's firewall looks a little less permanent.
Swedish voters will decide Sunday whether a party with neo-Nazi roots in its founding generation gets to run government ministries. The polls say it's a coin flip. The history says that however Sunday goes, the Sweden Democrats have already changed Sweden more than Sweden changed them.
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