Швециядағы 2006 жылғы жалпы сайлауы

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General elections were held in Sweden on 17 September 2006, to elect members to the Riksdag, the Swedish national legislature. All 349 seats were up for election: 310 fixed seats in 29 constituencies and 39 adjustment seats, used to ensure that parties have representation in the Riksdag proportional to their share of the national vote. The electoral system used was semi open list proportional representation using the Sainte Laguë method of allocating seats. Elections for County and Municipal councils were also held on the same day. Fredrik Reinfeldt from the Moderate Party was able to form a majority government together with the Centre Party, Liberal People's Party and the Christian Democrats following the election. The Social Democrats were ousted after twelve years in power. It was the country's first majority government since the second Fälldin cabinet fell in 1981. Reinfeldt reached out to working class votes in the re branding as the 'New Moderates', which resulted in sizeable gains in historically left wing locations in densely populated areas. As a result, several municipalities that had never voted blue before in Stockholm County flipped. One year later a similar meeting was held at Bankeryd, home of Göran Hägglund, leader of the Christian Democrats. See Alliance for Sweden for further information. The Alliance enjoyed a leading position for over a year over the red green parties, according to most polls. However the gap between the two blocs (s, v, and mp are assumed to work together) began to close rapidly in January 2006, and the red green parties took the lead in May 2006; indeed they were ahead of the Alliance in every poll conducted in May and June. However, there was a late shift in opinion back to the Alliance during the summer: in mid August all polls showed the Alliance leading the red green parties comfortably.

The minority government of Göran Persson's Social Democratic Party attempted, and failed, to gain enough seats to form a majority government, to continue as a minority or to govern in a red green coalition government. His party had been in power since the 1994 election, and Persson had been Prime Minister since 1996. The Social Democrats before the election had an agreement with the Left Party and the Green Party that gave them an influence on government policy in exchange for their support. However, both the Left Party and the Green Party insisted that any red green government formed after the election would need to include them in a coalition. The four centre right parties – The Moderate Party (m), The Liberal People's Party (fp), The Christian Democrats (kd), and The Centre Party (c) – united in Alliance for Sweden succeeded in gaining enough seats to form a coalition government. The four parties (formerly in opposition) had presented a joint election manifesto (although c, fp, and kd still had individual manifestos). Their candidate for Prime Minister was the Moderate Party leader, Fredrik Reinfeldt.

The regime shift that occurred in the 2006 election, however, can be traced to changes in popularity between the party blocs prior to the campaign really started and to the timing of two extreme natural disasters that combined had a dramatic impact on the Swedish political landscape. In a dissertation from the Department of Government at Uppsala University, entitled "Natural Disasters and National Election", PhD Lina M. Eriksson found in her research that the Indian Ocean’s 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and 2005 Storm Gudrun (Erwin), which struck only two weeks following the tsunami, impacted on the 2006 historic regime shift that occurred in the 2006 Swedish parliamentary election. The results from this research show that the 2002 2006 incumbent Social Democratic Party's (S) poor crisis response to Gudrun, which is the hitherto most costly natural disaster in Swedish history, alone has an estimated effect of a magnitude that likely was crucial to the 2006 historic regime shift. In the abstract to the thesis one can read "The 2002 2006 incumbent Social Democratic Party (S) received its lowest voter support since 1914 as roughly 150,000, or 8%, of the 2002 S voters went to the main opposition, the conservative Moderate Party (M). This became the most decisive factor in ousting S from power after 12 years of rule. As a result, the M led Alliance (A) with the People's Party (FP), the Center Party (C), and the Christian Democrats (KD) won the election. Natural Disasters and National Election makes the novel contribution of proposing two natural disasters, the Indian Ocean’s 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and 2005 Storm Gudrun (Erwin), which struck only two weeks following the tsunami, as major events that impacted government popularity in the 2006 election and contributed to the redistribution of voter support, within and across party blocs. The core findings from this thesis show that the S government’s poor crisis response to Gudrun, which is the hitherto most costly natural disaster in Swedish history, alone has an estimated effect of a magnitude that likely contributed to the 2006 historic regime shift, while the tsunami also seems to have mattered. The tsunami is particularly interesting, as S’s poor international crisis response to the event constitutes the first natural disaster situation to knowingly have affected an election on the other side of the planet. Moreover, to some degree voters recognized the active opposition by C as effective representation and rewarded the party for its strong stance on the poor handling of both events by S. In fact, the active voice of C concerning these disasters likely helped move the party from the periphery of party politics to becoming the third largest party in Swedish politics. In sum, this research investigates accountability and effective party representation via retrospective voting, which is an essential mechanism for the legitimacy of democracy. Findings suggest that the average Swedish voter indeed may be voting retrospectively to hold publicly elected officials accountable, which suggest a healthy status of the retrospective voting mechanism and Swedish democracy." Part of the dissertation has also been published in Electoral Studies, which is to be considered the leading scientific journal in election research. In the article long term effects are also found over the 2010 and 2014 election, which implies that the Storm triggered long lasting changes in voter support from the left to the right side of the political spectrum. A comprehensive summary of the dissertation is available for download via Uppsala University.