Green Party surges in Sweden’s biggest cities
Tuesday 15th September 2026 on 09:45 in
Sweden
The Green Party appears to be gaining ground in municipal elections in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, with its Stockholm result nearly doubling compared with 2022, SVT reports.
In Gothenburg, the party is recording the biggest increase of any party in the municipality and is heading towards an overall majority with its coalition partners, the Social Democrats and the Left Party. In Malmö, only the Left Party has increased more, while in Stockholm the Greens appear to have almost doubled their previous result and are also the fastest-growing party.
“It feels fantastic to have so many voters behind us,” Lars Strömgren, the Green Party’s leading candidate in Stockholm, wrote in a comment to SVT.
Strömgren, who is also Stockholm’s municipal traffic commissioner, said that parties seeking to grow in the city need to campaign for nature. He attributed the party’s performance partly to strong engagement with Stockholm’s forests and green spaces.
“The parties growing the most are those that campaigned to protect Stockholm’s green areas. First and foremost the Green Party, but also the Moderates,” he wrote.
The party also appears to be gaining ground in the parliamentary election. With 95 per cent of votes counted, it is projected to receive 6.1 per cent and 22 seats, an increase of one percentage point from the 2022 election. That is nevertheless considerably below several opinion polls conducted before the election, including an SVT/Verian poll published at the beginning of September.
SVT’s election map shows strong Green Party support in Sweden’s major cities, while some districts in inland Norrland also stand out. In Kiruna Nordost, the party has risen to 30.2 per cent from 9.6 per cent in 2022. The strongest Green Party result in any parliamentary election district is in Stockholm’s Skarpnäck 2 Brotorp, where the party has received 35 per cent.
Preliminary municipal election results show the Green Party on 11.2 per cent in Stockholm, compared with 6.1 per cent in 2022. In Gothenburg, it has 8.3 per cent, up from 6 per cent, while in Malmö it has 8.5 per cent, up from 5.5 per cent.