What to know about Sunday's election in Sweden, NATO's newest member

Sweden is holding an election on Sunday that will determine whether a conservative leader remains in charge and a hard-right party wins ministerial jobs for the first time, or whether the center-left returns to power. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is seeking a second four-year term at the helm of the European Union nation that is also NATO’s newest member. His predecessor hopes to win the job back. The question of who will govern has taken up more space than actual policy issues. More than 8 million people in the nation of about 10.6 million people are eligible to vote in the election for the 349-seat parliament in Stockholm, the Riksdag, which will elect the next prime minister. Kristersson has led Sweden since 2022 with a three-party center-right coalition. It relies on outside support from the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party that has far-right roots but has moved toward the political mainstream, for a parliamentary majority. If the right is re-elected, it can expect Cabinet posts this time. He's up against Magdalena Andersson of the center-left Social Democrats, a party that more often than not led Swedish governments since World War II. Andersson served as prime minister from 2021 until she lost power at the last election. Experts say the campaign has been fragmented and incoherent, with policy questions such as how health care should be organized drowned out a government. “Crime has come down, inflation has come down. So these topics are not really what people discuss," said Zeth Isaksson, a sociologist in electoral behavior at Stockholm University. "People discuss who is going to be in government, and that’s what the election is about.” How does it work? There are two major political blocs: one with four parties on the right and another with four parties on the left. So the big question is not so much which party wins as which side can put together a majority. Individual parties need a minimum 4% of the vote to win parliamentary seats. On the face of it, “it would be a sensation if the opposition parties, having been ahead in the opinion polls pretty much for four years since the last election, didn’t now win a majority,” said Nicholas Aylott, associate professor of political science at Södertörn University. But he said that an “extremely defensive” campaign , leaving some voters wondering why they should support the party. The right-wing bloc's hope of convincing voters that it's more united than its rivals may have had “a little impact,” he added.