Sweden’s three left-wing parties have won the support of 85 per cent of Muslim voters less than three weeks before the country’s general election, according to previously unpublished polling.
The figures come from the Novus voter barometer and were first reported by the Swedish magazine Fokus on August 24.
The Social Democrats alone drew 61.6 per cent of Muslim respondents, more than double the party’s standing among the electorate as a whole. The Left Party took 18.7 per cent and the Greens 4.9 per cent.
Support for the parties in office was close to nil. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Moderate Party reached 2.1 per cent, the Christian Democrats 1.5 per cent and the Liberals 0.2 per cent.
Their combined 3.8 per cent would not clear the four per cent threshold for entry to the Riksdag even if the three ran as a single party.
The right-wing Sweden Democrats, who prop up the minority Government under the Tidö Agreement, polled 10.4 per cent among Muslim respondents. That is more than double the score of their three governing-bloc partners put together.
Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, election researcher and professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg, said the pattern was neither new nor strange. He put it down mainly to class and income rather than to religion.
Poor, unemployed and socially marginalised voters had leaned left everywhere in the world, he said, describing the group as a form of new underclass dependent on benefits and the distribution of resources.
He added that the Novus margin looked high next to the data held by the Swedish National Election Studies Programme. Its 2021 report put Social Democrat support at 58.7 per cent and Left Party support at 8.3 per cent among people who identified as Muslim.
Ekengren Oscarsson also dismissed the argument, common on the Swedish Right, that the Social Democrats have a party interest in high immigration. “If this were a strategy, it is a terribly bad one,” he said.
Turnout among voters born outside Europe is markedly lower than among the native-born, and around a third of that group votes for the Right. Muslims made up just 2.6 per cent of the Novus sample.
Migration and crime have dominated the campaign, with the Government legislating against gang recruitment after 23 bystanders were killed in shootings over three years.
Swedes elect all 349 members of the Riksdag on September 13, alongside regional and municipal councils. Early voting opened on August 26.
