On a Sunday in September 2026, Sweden — a nation that spent more than two centuries charting its own course outside military alliances — goes to the polls for the first time as a full member of NATO. The vote is less a simple choice of government than a reckoning with transformation: how a people absorb a historic pivot, and what kind of country they wish to become on the other side of it. Driven into the alliance by the shockwaves of Russia's war in Ukraine, Swedes now face the quieter, harder work of deciding how deeply to commit to their new role in a restless Northern Europe.