Sweden’s Social Democrats are heading for a national election victory later this month backed by housing plans that some predict could dig the country deeper into debt.

Magdalena Andersson, likely to be the new finance minister if the opposition party prevails, has proposed using state-owned bank SBAB to bring down mortgage rates, which are already at four-year lows, to make housing more affordable.

However, some analysts expect that such a move would force property prices up further in a country that is already suffering from a shortage of homes and rising prices, which have more than doubled since 2000.

“We see the risk in the housing market from house prices continuing to go up,” Lee Tyrrell-Hendry, macro credit analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland in London told Bloomberg. “Any proposals that encourage people to borrow more, take on more debt and encourage more of a boom in the housing market are in some ways retrograde steps.”

However, Swedish households with mortgages currently owe an average of almost four times their disposable income, which looks reasonably conservative when compared to other global property markets. The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority also capped mortgage LTV’s at 85% in 2010.