Swedish voters went to the polls Sunday in an election that had been hyped, particularly by English-language media, as a major coming victory for the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats. Apart from the Bavarian election in mid-October, Sweden is perhaps the biggest remaining test for a far-right party in 2018.

Ultimately, the Sweden Democrats underperformed those sky-high expectations: they won 17.6 percent of the vote, still a significant increase over last time but nowhere near the 24 percent some polls suggested they would win. For my first piece in The Los Angeles Times, I broke down the results and put Sweden’s election into the context of broader European political trends.

For The Atlantic, I looked at Swedish social democracy as a beacon of hope for other center-left parties across Europe—and this sense among Social Democrats leaders and staffers that they need to modernize the movement’s aims and messaging for the post-2008 era. I traveled to Enköping, a city about 40 miles outside of Stockholm, to watch Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez campaign with Sweden’s Stefan Löfven.

And while the pre-election hype for the Sweden Democrats was clearly overblown, I wrote for Foreign Policy that in a way, the party still did win the election. It posted the biggest gains of any party, it set the agenda for campaign-trail topics of discussion and its vote share will likely frustrate efforts of either major coalition to build a government.

Now that I’ve finished up in Sweden, I’m spending six days in Bosnia to learn about the (very complicated) system of government ahead of Oct. 7 elections here. After that, I’ll spend a few days in Vienna reporting on the state of Sebastian Kurz’s government nearly a year after the Austrian election. Quite the busy fall here!