Sweden election: Right-wing bloc edges ahead, but final result could take days

euronews.com:

The final results of Sweden's general election might not be known until Wednesday, according to authorities, as a too-close-to-call count overnight from Sunday into Monday meant advance votes and overseas ballots will all need to be tallied. 

Although Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats emerged the biggest single party of the night with 30.5% of the vote, her progressive left-wing bloc of four parties did not appear to have enough seats in the Riksdag to form a government. 

Instead, a bloc lead by the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats looks at this stage to have a slender three-seat majority: with 176 seats to 173. 

The Sweden Democrats are clearly the big winners of this year's election polling almost 21% of the votes and  overtaking the traditional conservative opposition the Moderates to become the second biggest party in parliament. 

However the Sweden Democrats' leader Jimmie Åkesson has said he will not be prime minister. Instead Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson will take that role. 

“We are now the second biggest party in Sweden and it looks it’s going to stay that way," party leader Jimmie Akesson told his supporters.

“We know now that if there’s going to be a shift in power, we will be having a central role in that," he said. "Our ambition is to be in the government.”

The Sweden Democrats party has its roots in the white power and fascist movements of the late 1980s, but says it has now expelled extremists, as leader Jimmie Åkesson moved to tone down the part's rhetoric including replacing their original torch logo with a blue flower. 

However, senior party officials were still talking in public about the dangers of 'Islamisation' in Swedish society, and openly blamed Muslim immigrants for many