The left-wing Swedish Social Democrats continue their downward trend and although they won the overall European Parliament vote, they saw their worst performance in the party’s history.
Exit polls from national broadcaster SVT originally suggested that the ruling Social Democrats, headed by current Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, would take home around 25.1 per cent of the votes; but when the results were tallied, the party was reduced to 23.6 per cent.
Prime Minister Löfven downplayed the result, heaping praise on Social Democrat leading European candidate Helene Fritzon and others in the party saying: “There is no party that can do what the Social Democratic Labour Party does in the election movement, no one even comes close.”
He did, however, concede: “It is clear that we had wanted a better election result, I can say that straight away.”
On election day, the Social Democrats sent out a mass text message to 565,384 members of the public urging them to vote saying to vote for “security, jobs and equality — against those who threaten the rights of women and workers!”
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the unsolicited text message, according to Expressen, which claimed one voter had said: “I was upset. I wanted to reply to the text but I could not. It feels wrong that they may have gotten hold of my number and that I can’t reach them to be able to get back the data they have on me.”
Others questioned whether or not the text message had even been legal, including EU parliamentary Max Andersson who commented on social media that he had not given his consent.
The all-time low election result comes only months after the Social Democrats scored another historic low in the country’s last national election in 2018.
While the Social Democrats saw a decline in their vote, the populist Sweden Democrats (SD) saw the opposite, nearly doubling their European Parliament vote from 2014, finishing at 15.4 per cent and saw the most gains of any Swedish party.