The centre-right parties of the Tidö coalition have failed to regain lost ground in Verian's first opinion poll on behalf of public broadcaster SVT since June, with the centre-left opposition holding onto a ten-percentage-point lead.
The Moderates, Sweden Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberals together garner 43.9 percent of the vote, while the Social Democrats, Green Party, Centre Party and Left Party reach 53.9 percent.
Per Söderpalm, head of polling at Verian, believes it will be difficult for the Tidö parties to close the gap.
"We have no historical precedent for anyone managing to stage a comeback of this scale," he told SVT.
Translated into parliamentary seats, the outlook is even more advantageous for the opposition, giving them 196 seats to the government bloc's 153. This is because the Liberals fall below the four-percent parliamentary threshold in the survey, meaning they would fail to secure any seats at all.
The Centre Party shows a clear surge, jumping from 5.4 percent in June to 8 percent in August. Changes for the remaining parties are marginal.
But Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, a professor of political science at Gothenburg University, played down the significance of the survey. According to him, the polls usually hit a summer lull, and the lack of major shifts since June is only to be expected.
"Many voters will probably start paying attention now as digital voting cards arrive, and those who don't follow politics day-to-day will want to get up to speed. This is when parties need to win over undecided voters and persuade the electorate that they can be trusted with their votes," he told TT.
Verian's political barometer is based on approximately 3,000 interviews drawn from the Sifo panel – a pool recruited via randomly selected, nationally representative sampling.
Respondents were asked: "Which party would you vote for if a general election were held today?"
The survey was conducted between August 3rd and 16th.
Its results are in stark contrast to another poll conducted by Demoskop on behalf of Aftonbladet earlier this month.
The Demoskop poll suggested that the lead of Sweden's four opposition parties over the government had halved to just 3.7 percentage points, in the first opinion poll carried out since the summer break.
Demoskop, which is owned by the right-wing lobbyist Peje Emilsson, came in for criticism in March this year, after one of its polls gave the Liberal Party the support of 4.5 percent of voters, putting the party well over the parliamentary threshold.
The former TT journalist Owe Nilsson accused the polling company of seeking to influence public opinion rather than measuring it in a post on Bluesky. Other polling companies estimated the party's support at closer to 2 percent.
Demoskop uses a self-recruited panel, which its critics argue makes its results unscientific. Defenders of the method, on the other hand, argue that the new methods are necessary when fewer respondents pick up their phone, and that Demoskop presented the closest prediction of the election result in both 2018 and 2022.
You can see how the poll affects the options for making the next Swedish government in the updated version of The Local's election widget: