THE SWEDISH ELECTION

The outcome of Sunday's election in Sweden looks remarkably like that in Denmark back in 2011.

Voters were fed up with the ruling right of centre coalition, and booted it out (though in contrast to Lars Løkke Rasmussen here, outgoing Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt also resigned the leadership of his party, Moderaterne). The leader of the Social Democrats, Stefan Löfven, was duly given first shot at forming a Government.

However, as in Denmark, not wanting the right is not the same as embracing the left. In both countries, the Social Democrats have been the natural party of Government for more than a century. But the Swedish version could not increase its share of the vote at the right's expense; and despite having allies to the left and in the Green Party, Mr. Löfven has not got a Parliamentary majority. Like Helle Thorning-Schmidt in 2011, he will have to cut a deal with one of the small centrist parties or run a minority government in order to stay in office.

So if neither right nor left are winning, who is? Again, the answer is strikingly similar. In Denmark, the party with the most momentum over the past decade has been the far-right, anti-immigrant, Danish People's Party; in Sweden, it is the much newer Sweden Democrats, a clone of the DPP, which has copied the Danish version's tactics almost to the letter. They increased their share of the vote from 5.7% to 12.9% and are now Sweden's third largest party. As in Denmark, working class Swedes, who in the past would reliably have supported the Social Democrats, have crossed the political aisle, spooked by immigrants (real or imagined) and the threat (real or imagined) caused by them to jobs, public services and "Swedishness".

Despite the similarities, there is however still one big difference between the two countries. In Denmark, the DPP supported the former right of centre minority government during the noughties, doing ad hoc political deals that gave it great influence. In Sweden, the election was fought by all of the established parties on the explicit platform that there was no way they would deal with the Sweden Democrats. This was an admirable position; it remains to be seen whether it can hold. After all, it is difficult to exclude for ever a political party - however unsavoury - if it is supported by an eighth of the population.

Walter Blotscher