On election night, the dance floor at the Sweden Democrats’ party stayed mostly empty. Sweden’s far-right, anti-immigration party, founded in 1988 out of the country’s extreme-right fringe, had gained ground at every national election since and became the second-largest party in 2022. On September 13 it fell from 20.5 to 17.5 percent, losing voters in 285 of Sweden’s 290 municipalities.
The loss followed four years of unusual influence. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of the centre-right Moderates governed in a minority coalition with the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, kept alive by Sweden Democrat votes. The price, set down in the Tidö Agreement, named after the castle where it was signed, was a decisive say over migration and crime policy without a single ministry.
Judged by influence, those were the best four years in the party’s history. Sweden tightened its migration rules and gave police sweeping new powers against gangs, and shootings fell from 390 in 2022 to 147 in 2025. The centre-left Social Democrats under Magdalena Andersson, whose bloc now holds a three-seat majority, campaigned close to the government’s line on crime. The agenda the party was built to push has become Swedish consensus. Its voters did not turn against it. They simply stopped needing a protest party to demand it.
Denmark has seen this before. The Danish People’s Party fell from 21 percent in 2015 to under 3 percent in 2022, after the Social Democrats adopted its immigration line.
Outsiders read a far-right party’s vote share as a gauge of its power. For a protest party, it is closer to the opposite: a measure of the distance between what voters want and what they get. The number falls when the party wins.
Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland stands near 30 percent in national polls, behind a firewall that keeps it out of every coalition. Apart from tighter border controls, which Friedrich Merz’s government adopted in a narrower form than the AfD demanded, the party has won nothing. Read the Swedish way, 30 percent measures how much the AfD has been denied, and the firewall that keeps it from power is also what keeps that number high.