Opposition widens lead, SVT poll shows male voters leaving Tidö bloc, biggest gap since August 2023

• SVT/Verian’s May poll puts the opposition 10.7 points ahead of the Tidö parties.
• The governing bloc is down 1.5 points from the previous measurement.
• SVT reports that the government parties are losing male voters.
• The result cuts against the government’s claim to stability ahead of the next political phase.

The opposition leads the governing Tidö bloc by 10.7 percentage points in SVT/Verian’s May poll, after the government parties lost 1.5 points from the previous measurement. SVT reports that the shift is driven by male voters leaving the four parties that support Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s government.

That matters because male voters have been one of the Tidö parties’ sturdier pools of support, especially on issues where the government has tried to own the field: crime, migration, defence and a general promise of order after the 2022 election. A loss there does not just trim the margin. It suggests that the government’s strongest themes are no longer compensating for weaker ground on household finances, taxes and the broader cost of living.

The poll is a snapshot rather than a forecast, but the size of the bloc gap stands out. SVT says it is the largest since August 2023, which places the result above the range of ordinary month-to-month noise and back into the territory of a clear opposition advantage. For a government that has sold itself on competence and steadiness, a widening deficit after nearly two years in office is a harder number to explain away than a single-party dip or a temporary wobble.

The internal movement is also more revealing than the topline. When a centre-right coalition loses men, the problem is usually not one issue but several arriving at once: tougher criminal policy no longer delivers fresh electoral returns, defence spending is too distant from daily budgets, and tax or fuel relief is too thin to reset household sentiment. Voters can agree with the direction of travel and still decide the bill is too high, the pace too slow, or the gains too abstract.

That leaves the next phase of Swedish politics looking less like a contest over grand realignment than over credibility under pressure. The opposition’s lead is large, but bloc politics in Sweden can tighten quickly once parties move from broad dissatisfaction to concrete governing alternatives. For now, the measurable fact is narrower: in a poll where the government needed its core constituencies to hold, male voters moved the other way.

In SVT’s May measurement, the distance between the blocs is 10.7 points.

Källor: SVT Nyheter