Election posters are returning to streets and squares across Sweden as the campaign for the 13 September elections moves into public space. Swedish voters will elect the Riksdag, municipal councils and regional councils, and parties are once again covering roadsides and urban spaces with candidates’ faces, party colours and short slogans. In a campaign increasingly fought through social media, video and targeted advertising, the persistence of a medium more than a century old raises a simple question: what are election posters still for?
The answer appears to have less to do with changing a voter’s mind than with visibility, recognition and repetition. Unlike a social media advertisement, a poster does not depend on an algorithm, a subscription or a voter choosing to engage with political content. It occupies a shared physical space.
Election posters are difficult to avoid
Nicklas Håkansson, associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG), told TT, in an article published by Sweden Herald that political posters remain a strong campaign tradition and are particularly difficult for the public to avoid.
“Much other advertising is relatively easy to defend against, but election posters in public spaces are more difficult to avoid,” he said.
That gives them a different role from much contemporary political advertising.
Digital campaigns can divide voters into audiences and deliver different messages according to location, interests or other characteristics. Posters largely do the opposite: people passing through the same street or square encounter the same candidate, the same slogan and the same visual identity.
They turn an election from something encountered selectively through news or digital platforms into something visible in everyday surroundings.
Their direct effect on voting decisions is much harder to establish. Håkansson argues that posters should not primarily be understood as instruments designed to make people switch political preferences. Their role is closer to a reminder: the election is approaching, and the party is here.
A successful poster, in this interpretation, does not have to win an argument by itself. It has to make the rest of the campaign easier to recognise.
Swedish parties are still investing in them
Sweden’s largest parties show little sign of abandoning the format.
According to TT, the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) plans to put up around 20,000 election posters, at least as many as in the previous general election. Its campaign uses the posters to emphasise work incentives and punishment for crime.
The Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokraterna) is also maintaining its investment and is campaigning under the slogan “Time to take Sweden seriously.”
The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) are using “We make Sweden Sweden again” and describe election posters as a small but still important part of a broader campaign in which the party says it is investing more than before.
The slogans illustrate what happens when a political campaign has only a few words to make its point.
Rather than summarising an electoral programme, each tries to establish a frame. The Social Democratic message presents the election around seriousness and responsibility. The Sweden Democrats’ slogan centres identity and restoration. The Moderates foreground work and criminal justice.
The poster therefore identifies the political conflict through which a party would prefer voters to interpret the election, leaving speeches, interviews, debates and other campaign material to provide the details.
Swedish posters have become more personal
Election posters have not always looked like this.
Håkansson says early Swedish posters were often cartoon-like and could contain considerably longer political texts. Contemporary versions are designed for quick consumption: a short message, an image and an immediately identifiable political sender.
The increasing prominence of politicians’ faces is particularly significant.
A study by University of Gothenburg researchers Bengt Johansson and Orla Vigsø examined more than 3,000 Swedish election posters produced between 1907 and 2019. The researchers traced a major transformation in how politicians were portrayed.
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, politicians shown on Swedish posters typically appeared serious. Smiling politicians began to emerge in the late 1960s and eventually became the dominant representation.
The researchers connect this development to the personalisation and increasing intimacy of politics, influenced in part by television and changing relationships between political authorities and voters.
A candidate’s face is no longer simply an illustration accompanying a party message. It has increasingly become part of the message itself.
Research elsewhere in Europe points in a similar direction. A 2019 analysis of 1,857 German federal election posters from 1949 to 2017 found a clear increase in visual personalisation over time. The researchers described the broader development as an increasing visualisation of political communication.
The Swedish posters appearing this summer are therefore part of a much longer shift: parties have increasingly learned to make individual politicians carry their political identity visually.
Why modern posters say so little
The brevity of contemporary election posters is partly determined by where people see them.
A voter may encounter one while walking to a station, cycling through a junction or passing it in a car or bus. The opportunity to attract attention can last only a few seconds.
That helps explain the combination that now dominates the format: a recognisable face, a short political proposition and a clear party identity.
It also explains why judging a poster by the amount of political information it contains can be misleading.
A manifesto can explain policy. A television debate can contrast proposals. A campaign video can develop an argument. A street poster performs a narrower task: it makes a candidate, party or message recognisable enough to be recalled elsewhere.
This is particularly relevant because political communication no longer takes place through separate online and offline campaigns.
A study of 1,069 traditional and online posters used during the 2013 and 2017 German federal elections found that established and newer forms of campaigning coexist within a hybrid media system rather than simply replacing one another.
The researchers also found differences between the environments, including significantly more negative campaigning in online posters than in physical ones.
A slogan seen beside a road may therefore reappear in a social video, an online advertisement, a speech or a television interview. Repetition connects the different parts of the campaign.
The physical poster is one point of contact within that larger system.
Posters also mobilise the parties themselves
Election posters have another audience that is easy to overlook: the people running the campaign.
Tobias Baudin, party secretary of the Social Democrats, told TT that posters can contribute to voter mobilisation but also have an internal function by “keeping the election pulse up”.
Putting thousands of signs into public space requires local party organisations, campaign workers and volunteers. Håkansson says that in some parts of larger cities there is even competition between parties for the most visible locations.
The arrival of the posters therefore marks the transition into the most intensive phase of an election campaign.
This helps explain why parties continue to invest time and resources in a format whose effect on individual votes is difficult to isolate. The poster is simultaneously political advertising, physical presence and a campaign ritual.
Sweden’s election is becoming visible
Sweden will vote on 13 September 2026, with early voting beginning on 26 August, according to the Swedish Election Authority (Valmyndigheten).
Election posters begin appearing around four or five weeks before the vote, depending on local rules. County Administrative Boards (Länsstyrelserna) regulate their placement along public roads outside locally regulated areas, with restrictions intended primarily to protect road safety and visibility.
The regulations explain when and where posters can appear. Their political significance begins once they do.
For the next several weeks, Sweden’s parties will simultaneously publish social videos, buy digital advertising, hold campaign events and compete for coverage in traditional media. Yet thousands of printed portraits and slogans will continue to occupy streets and squares.
Their survival does not mean political campaigning has resisted digitalisation. It suggests instead that digitalisation has not eliminated the value of shared political visibility.
In an increasingly personalised media environment, different voters can follow different politicians, consume different news and receive different advertisements. The election poster retains one unusual characteristic.
Everyone passing it sees the same thing.
