The surge of populist radical right parties in Europe and beyond has forced political scientists to reconsider their voting model and theories. In this paper, we explore how this has changed patterns of strategic voting. We assume that voters form expectations of government outcomes. Our argument is that the accommodating strategy of mainstream parties toward populist radical right parties increased their viability as government parties, and therefore modified the strategic incentives of some voters. First, some should in theory defect from their first preference in a leftist direction to compensate for the anticipated influence of the populist radical right in a right-wing coalition. Second, others should come back to their first preference, as the radical right does not constitute a protest party without any prospects of governing any more. To test these hypotheses, we leverage cross-country survey data from the CSES, and survey panel data from Sweden where the centre-right parties in 2019 lifted the cordon sanitaire around the Sweden Democrats. This created a shock in the survey that can be used to identify the relationship between governmental viability of the populist radical right party and centre-right voters’ vote intentions.