The present municipality was formed in 1971 through the amalgamation of the City of Flen (instituted in 1949), the market town (köping) Malmköping and the surrounding countryside, including a southeastern portion of the former Oppunda hundred that was split between Flen and Nyköping municipalities. It also includes all of the former Villåttinge hundred.
Geography
Flen Municipality is a lowland inland municipality that falls to 19 metres (62 ft) above sea level on the lakes of Långhalsen and Torpfjärden in the southeastern area.[3] The highest peak is at 103 metres (338 ft) on the tripoint between Flen, Gnesta and Strängnäs municipalities.[4]
Of these places, Malmköping, located about 15 km north of Flen, surpasses Flen as a tourism attraction due to its two annual markets. The traditions of markets in Malmköping goes back centuries, as Malmköping got market town rights (became a köping) already in 1785.
Elections
The following results are since the 1972 municipal reform onwards.
This is a demographic table based on Flen Municipality's electoral districts in the 2022 Swedish general election sourced from SVT's election platform, in turn taken from SCB official statistics.[19]
Flen is a poor municipality by lower Svealand standards.[19] As of 2022 it was a rather segregated municipality with very high levels of ethnic minority populations concentrated south of the railway, while people of Swedish background are in a sizeable majority in the outer parts of town and in the countryside. Every district was beneath the median income of its southern neighbour Nyköping.[19][20] In total there were 16,271 inhabitants with 11,959 Swedish citizen adults eligible to vote.[19] The political demographics were 50.4 % for the left bloc and 48.4 % for the right bloc, with the left dominating the town and the right sizeably winning the villages and countryside.[19] No district reached 35% college graduates and unemployment was high throughout much of the municipality.[19] Indicators are in percentage points except population totals and income.