Why Sweden’s first female prime minister lasted just seven hours

Sweden’s prime minister-elect yesterday resigned just seven hours after being appointed as the country’s first female leader.

MPs “burst into applause” as Magdalena Andersson, a former finance minister, “wiped away a tear” as she was voted into office following a “last-minute, late-night deal” with the country’s former communist Left Party, The Telegraph said.

But just hours later, her tenure was over after “her Green Party coalition partners decided to leave the government after it failed to pass its budget”, the paper added.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Highest high to lowest low

At a press conference after MPs approved her coalition government, Andersson told reporters that it was a “special day”, adding that she was “raring to go”.

But just seven hours later, having tendered her resignation, she told the same group of journalists that she was stepping down out of “respect”, adding: “I do not want to lead a government for which there are reasons to question the legitimacy.”

Andersson, who has been dubbed “the bulldozer” of Swedish politics, was elected as prime minister earlier in the day because under Swedish law, she only needed a majority of MPs not to vote against her. A majority could not be mustered to stop her taking office by one vote.

Her decision to step aside, however, “followed a turbulent series of events” that began when Sweden’s “Centre Party withdrew its support for Andersson’s budget, due to the concessions made to the Left” in order to form a coalition, The Local reported.

“That meant the new PM’s budget didn’t have enough votes to pass in parliament”, meaning MPs “instead adopted an alternative budget” presented by the conservative Moderates, Christian Democrats and far-right Sweden Democrats”, the site added.

After the Swedish parliament voted in favour of the opposition budget, the Greens then left Andersson’s coalition “in protest after parliament refused to back the government’s spending plans”, the Financial Times (FT) said.

“There is a constitutional practice that a coalition government should resign when one party quits,” Andersson said after the Greens’ decision to withdraw from her governing group. “I don’t want to lead a government whose legitimacy will be questioned.”

Andersson has said that she will “try to become prime minister again as a single party government leader”, the BBC reported, while the speaker of the Swedish parliament has already begun “contacting party leaders on the next move”.

The Greens have “said they would back Andersson as prime minister in the new vote”, paving a way forward for her to reclaim the premiership, “but it is unclear how other parties would react”, the FT added.

No confidence

Sweden has long been considered “a bastion of political stability”, with the Social Democrats coming “first in every election in more than a century”, the FT said. But it is “facing an extended period of political turmoil as a result of the rapid rise of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats”.

The party, which euronews said is “rooted in a neo-Nazi movement”, “first entered parliament in 2010” and “has broken up the traditional system of left-wing and right-wing blocs”, the FT added. This means that “new uneasy constellations are only starting to be formed”.

Stefan Lofven, Andersson’s predecessor as both prime minister and Social Democrat leader, in June became the first Swedish head of government to be forced to resign after a no-confidence vote.

Dubbed “the Harry Houdini of European politics” by Politico, Lofven successfully governed a number of historically weak coalition governments from 2014. But he faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic before the Left Party withdrew its support following the publication of a government report on removing rent controls.

Andersson has “built a reputation for being direct and blunt”, The Guardian said, and was recently described by Swedish national broadcaster SVT as a “bulldozer”.

Anders Lindberg, political editor of social democratic paper Aftonbladet, told the paper: “People even say they are scared of her which is kind of funny, these elite political scientists or professors of economics saying they are afraid of her.

“She has a little bit of an Angela Merkel way of arguing. It’s not completely clear what she wants to say all the time, but [she] ends up winning the argument because no one else can really answer because she masters all the details.”

She “now faces the challenge of uniting the disparate parties – ranging from the ex-communists of the Left party to the nominally centre-right Centre party – which backed her in a new vote”, the FT said. The speaker of Sweden’s parliament is expected to lay out a timetable for forming a new governing bloc this afternoon.

Writing on the BBC, Sweden-watcher Maddy Savage said that “if there’s another prime ministerial vote, Andersson will probably get voted in again” given that the Green Party “has promised to support her, despite quitting as a formal coalition partner”.

But she would be “in a vulnerable position at the helm of a fragile minority government”, meaning she would “have to stick to the right-wing budget already voted on by parliament.

“What all this political chaos has underlined is just how divided Swedish politics is right now,” she added