In the 1988 general election they won seats in the Swedish Riksdag for the first time, capturing 5.5 percent of the vote, and becoming the first new party to enter parliament in seventy years.

[15] In the 2018 general election, the Greens received 4.4% of the vote and 16 seats, making the party the smallest in the Riksdag.

[16] The platform then describes these solidarities being expressed in "several fundamental ideas", these being participatory democracy, ecological wisdom, social justice, children's rights, circular economy, global justice, nonviolence, equality and feminism, animal rights, self-reliance and self-administration, freedom, and long-sightedness.

[17] The Swedish Green Party has its roots in the environmental, solidarity, women's rights and peace movements.

[19] The party supports a general shift in taxation policy, towards high taxes on environmentally unfriendly or unsustainable products and activities, hoping to thus influence people's behavior towards the more sustainable.

The section of the party platform on the subject opens by citing how decentralization and making decisions as locally as reasonably possible is a central part of green politics.

[28][32] During a seminar in 2014, Kaplan equalized jihadists who travel to Syria with Swedish volunteers who fought on the Finnish side against the Soviet Union during the Winter War 1939-1940.

[34] After his resignation, images emerged of Kaplan and other members of the Green Party displaying hand gestures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

[28][32] Another controversy ensued as a rising Green-Party star, Yasri Khan, refused to shake hands with a female TV reporter.

[30][32] Lars Nicander, director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish Defence University, compared the revelations with how the Soviet Union sought to infiltrate democratic Western parties during the Cold War, alleging that the Green Party similarly may have been "infiltrated by Islamists".

In April 2016, Kamal al Raffi, a Green Party politician from the council of Burlöv Municipality as well as the chairman of the local Syrian community group invited Osama bin Laden's former advisor Salman al-Ouda to hold a lecture to be attended by his and two other community groups.

This invitation was controversial in Sweden as Al-Ouda, a muslim salafist, is known for openly antisemitic views and denying the Holocaust.

[39] In May 2016, Green Party co-spokesperson and Environmental Minister Åsa Romson confirmed she would resign from both positions as a result of her leadership during the party crisis, along with controversies of her own, such as referring to the September 11 attacks as the 11 September "olycka" ('accident' or 'misfortune', Romson later claimed she had meant the latter) in a television interview.

In an article published in 2009, Maria Wetterstrand, then party co-spokesperson, defined the party as a natural home also for green-minded social liberals and libertarian socialists, by referring to its liberal policy regarding immigration and its support of personal integrity, participation and entrepreneurship, among other issues.

The Green Party on first entering the Riksdag, allied with the Conservative Bloc in opposition to the Social Democrats.