The Swedish election this past September 11 brought a breakthrough for the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, preparing the most far-right-influenced government in the country’s history. This can be seen as the culmination of a long process in which the party has held ever more sway, increasingly supported by capitalist interests and a steadily weaker traditional right, which realizes its only route to political power runs through aid from this party.

Yet this also represents a certain reversal of political momentum. As late as summer-fall 2021, the left-wing challenge to the Social-Democratic-led government was so powerful that it could shift the whole political scene. One year ago, the Swedish Left Party brought down — then reinstated — the center-led government in order to stop the deregulation of rents. This brought a remarkable poll rise for the Left and a change of the overall media-political agenda, providing the opportunity to force through a historically large rise in both pensions and sick pay benefits. Yet both the war in Ukraine and other political actors turned focus away from these issues.

Both these successes and the later setback (taking the Left Party from 8 percent in 2018, to 12 percent in polls in August 2021, then 6.7 percent in this election) relates to a long-term Left Party strategy, aiming at breaking the far right’s grip of the political agenda, replacing the Social Democrats as the most important force on the Left and recreating an overall left-wing majority. We will return to this. But let’s start with how the merger of the traditional right and the far-right strengthened the latter and aided its election victory.