Sweden’s young voters are moving to the left, complicating a political narrative that has become increasingly common across Europe: that younger generations, and young men in particular, are shifting decisively towards the right. New polling ahead of Sweden’s 13 September election shows instead that the opposition now leads among voters aged 18 to 29, with one of the largest changes taking place among young men.
According to SVT and Verian, support for the four Tidö parties among men aged 18 to 29 has fallen from 63.7% in August 2022 to 43.9% in 2026. Over the same period, support for the opposition has increased from 33.5% to 50.2%.
The change is substantial enough to challenge the image produced by Sweden’s previous election, when young men appeared to be one of the most reliable constituencies for the country’s right.
But it also makes Sweden an interesting exception within a broader Nordic debate about politics, gender and younger voters.
Sweden’s young men are no longer clearly on the right
The political gender gap has not disappeared in Sweden. It remains very large.
Among women aged 18 to 29, 74.2% currently support one of the opposition parties, compared with 25.6% for the parties behind the Tidö Agreement: the Moderate Party (Moderaterna), Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna) and Liberals (Liberalerna).
Young Swedish women are therefore still much further to the left than young men.
What has changed is the position of the men.
Four years ago, almost two thirds of young male voters supported the Tidö parties. Today, the opposition has a narrow lead among them. As Per Söderpalm, head of public opinion at Verian, told SVT, the idea that young men vote clearly conservatively no longer describes the Swedish electorate particularly well.
This matters because the gender divide had become one of the most discussed features of younger generations in European politics. Young women have increasingly identified with progressive, green and left-wing positions, while young men have often moved in the opposite direction.
Sweden now suggests that this development may be less linear than it first appeared.
Young Swedes have changed more than older voters
The shift is not limited to young men. According to a separate SVT analysis of Verian data, voters aged 18 to 29 are now the age group in which the red-green parties have their strongest support.
Young respondents also place themselves further to the left on the traditional left-right scale than the electorate as a whole, particularly young women.
Their priorities are somewhat different too. Housing and gender equality rank as more important issues among young voters than among older age groups, according to SVT.
This offers at least part of the context for understanding what has happened during the four years of the Tidö government.
Young voters entered the current parliamentary term during a period shaped by high inflation, rising housing costs and increasingly difficult access to the housing market. For people who are only beginning their working lives, questions about rents, welfare and economic security can have a different weight than they do for older homeowners with accumulated assets.
That does not automatically translate into left-wing voting. But it is a reminder that generational politics is rarely fixed.
A voter who was attracted by lower taxes, tougher migration policies or anti-establishment politics at 20 may have a different set of priorities four years later.
Norway has moved in almost the opposite direction
The clearest Nordic comparison comes from Norway, and it points in a remarkably different direction.
At the 2025 Norwegian parliamentary election, the right-wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, Frp) made particularly large gains among young men.
According to Statistics Norway, 38% of men under 35 voted for Frp in 2025, up from just 15% in 2021. Among women of the same age, support also increased, but from 7% to 17%.
Frp consequently became the largest party among young Norwegian men, while the Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) was the largest among young women. Statistics Norway concluded that the gender gap in political preferences had widened compared with 2021, driven in large part by Frp’s rise.
Norway therefore provides almost a mirror image of what is now happening in Sweden.
In both countries, young women remain markedly more favourable to parties on the left. But while Norwegian young men moved strongly towards the populist right between 2021 and 2025, Swedish young men have moved away from the right between 2022 and 2026.
That difference is important because it shows the limits of treating young European men as a single political category.
Finland still shows a widening gender divide
Finland offers another variation.
A study reported by Yle in 2024 found that political differences between Finnish men and women were increasing, with the largest gaps among younger age groups.
Young Finnish men were more likely to describe themselves as conservative, while young women were considerably more likely to identify as liberal. Researchers also found particularly strong potential for left-wing and Green parties among younger women.
The researchers nevertheless noted an important distinction: the gender gap was larger when respondents were asked about their political identity than when they were questioned about individual policy issues.
That distinction may help explain why apparently profound ideological shifts can sometimes reverse quickly.
A generation can describe itself as conservative, liberal, left or right while still changing its voting behaviour when economic conditions, political leadership or the issues dominating an election change.
Denmark’s 2026 election complicates the picture further
Denmark’s 2026 general election offers another reason to be cautious about describing young voters as a uniformly rightward-moving generation.
In YouGov’s election model shortly before the March vote, the red bloc led among both young women and young men aged 18 to 34. Among young women, the margin was 62% to 34%; among young men, it was narrower but still clear, at 54% to 43%.
The gender divide nevertheless remained visible inside the party system. The Green Left (Socialistisk Folkeparti, SF) attracted around 24% of women aged 18 to 34, while the Liberal Alliance was particularly strong among young men, with about 15% support. More broadly, YouGov’s demographic breakdown showed Liberal Alliance performing particularly well among younger voters, while support for parties to the Social Democrats’ left was also substantially higher among younger Danes than among older age groups.
That makes Denmark different from Norway. Young Danish men were still more likely to favour the left than the right as a bloc, even while a distinctly male and youthful constituency remained important for Liberal Alliance.
The official 2026 school election (Skolevalg) pointed in a similar direction among even younger voters. The Social Democratic youth organisation, Danmarks Socialdemokratiske Ungdom, finished first with 23%, ahead of Liberal Alliances Ungdom on 16.5% and Venstres Ungdom on just under 10%. According to the Folketing’s account of the results, a youth researcher from Aarhus University linked the outcome partly to greater attention to welfare and social issues during the campaign.
The school election is not directly comparable with a general election, and the YouGov figures refer to voting intentions rather than validated age-by-gender results from the ballot itself. But together they suggest that Denmark in 2026 did not fit neatly into the idea of a Nordic generation moving steadily to the right.
There may be no single political direction for Generation Z
The Swedish numbers therefore say something broader than simply that young men have “become left-wing”.
They show how difficult it is to draw permanent conclusions about a generation that is still forming its political identity.
In Norway, the 2025 election seemed to confirm a widening ideological gap between young men and women. Finland has shown a similar gender divide. Denmark’s 2026 election, however, showed a red-bloc advantage even among young men, despite the strength of Liberal Alliance within that group.
Now Sweden is moving differently again.
Part of the explanation may simply be electoral cycles. Governing parties generally lose some voters over time, and the Tidö parties have governed Sweden since 2022. The Swedish shift should therefore not automatically be interpreted as a permanent ideological transformation.
There is another clue in the data. SVT and Verian find that young voters are more willing than older voters to change political bloc, and young men are particularly overrepresented among voters who could still move from one side to the other before the election.
In other words, what distinguishes younger voters may not be that they are becoming permanently more left-wing or more right-wing.
It may be that they are less politically loyal.
For parties, that makes them attractive but difficult voters. For anyone trying to understand the politics of the next decade, it also suggests some caution.
The divide between young men and young women is real across several Nordic countries. But the comparisons between Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark show that its political consequences are far from uniform. A generation often described as moving inexorably to the right is, in reality, moving in different directions depending on the country, the election and the political context.
