Liberals surge past threshold as Moderates hit 23-year low

The Liberals have risen to 5.5 per cent in SVT/Verian’s final opinion poll before election day, while the Moderates have fallen to 15.8 per cent, their lowest level in more than two decades.

A large share of the Liberals’ gains comes from Moderate voters switching parties, according to Per Söderpalm, Verian’s polling director. The poll was published by SVT on Friday.

“The Liberals are in a strong trend and are continuing to rise at the end of the polling period,” Söderpalm said. “The large majority of their voters, however, come from the Moderates.”

The Moderates’ result is close to the 15.5 per cent recorded in a poll in April 2003, the same month Bo Lundgren resigned as party leader. The party entered the election campaign with low figures and is facing strong competition for voters from the other Tidö parties, Söderpalm said.

He added that the Moderates had struggled to attract voters from the opposition, despite some smaller flows from the Social Democrats.

Gap between blocs narrows

The gap between the political blocs has narrowed to 5.6 percentage points, down from 8.2 points a week earlier. The opposition still holds a narrow advantage.

“The large movements in public opinion show that much can still happen,” Söderpalm said.

The Tidö parties have gained some voters from the Social Democrats and the Centre Party, as well as from people who previously did not support a party, according to Verian.

The Social Democrats received 27.6 per cent in the poll, a result that is statistically significantly below the party’s 2022 election result. The party is losing voters to both other red-green parties and the Tidö parties, although the movements are not large. Its decline slowed somewhat towards the end of the polling period.

The only statistically significant change compared with last week’s poll was the Liberals’ increase.

How the poll was conducted

Verian’s voter barometer is based on around 3,000 completed interviews with members of the Sifo panel. The panel is recruited through random, nationally representative samples and has around 85,000 participants.

The survey covers people aged 18 to 84 and is supplemented by telephone interviews with people aged 85 and older. Respondents were asked which party they would vote for if an election were held that day.

The poll was conducted from September 4 to 10, 2026. The response rate was around 40 per cent, and respondents were checked for representativeness by gender, age, region, education and party sympathies in the previous election.