Sweden woke up on Monday to one of the closest election results in its modern political history, with preliminary counts showing the centre-left opposition bloc holding a razor-thin lead over Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s incumbent right-wing alliance — but the final outcome remains too close to call.

With around 94% of electoral districts counted, the preliminary seat distribution gave the opposition 176 seats in the 349-seat Riksdag, against 173 for the parties supporting the outgoing government — a margin of just three seats that could yet shift as late and overseas votes are tallied.

Official results are expected within a week, with all votes automatically recounted by the country’s regions.

The Social Democrats, led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, remained the single largest party with 28.1% of the vote and 1,784,358 votes — but the result is bittersweet.

Their roughly 28% share marks a significant drop from 30.3% in 2022. The Moderates came in second with 19.9%, while the Sweden Democrats—whose anti-immigration platform defined much of the campaign—slipped to 17.6%, a drop of 3 percentage points from their 2022 performance.

The Green Party and Christian Democrats posted modest gains of 1.0 and 0.9 percentage points, respectively.

Opinion polls had given the left-wing opposition a comfortable lead for much of the campaign, but the gap narrowed significantly in the final days before the vote — turning what many expected to be a clear change of government into a nail-biting count.

Voter turnout stood at 80.3%, with more than half of eligible voters casting their ballots in advance, reflecting Sweden’s traditionally high civic participation.

A centre-left victory would still leave Andersson facing potentially difficult coalition talks, with the bloc needing to hold together parties spanning from the Social Democrats to the Left Party and the Greens.

On the right, Kristersson faces the prospect of losing power despite his coalition partners — the Christian Democrats and Liberals — both posting gains on the night.

Sweden now enters a period of political uncertainty, with every remaining ballot carrying weight in one of the Nordic nation’s most consequential elections in decades.