Magdalena Andersson

Magdalena Andersson (born January 23, 1967, Uppsala, Sweden) is a Swedish politician who became the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and Sweden’s first woman prime minister in November 2021 when she replaced Stefan Löfven.

Early life and career

The only daughter of a statistics professor father and a mother who taught high-school social studies, Andersson grew up in the university town of Uppsala. As a youth, she was an elite swimmer and twice won a gold medal in breaststroke at the Swedish national junior championships. At age 14 she also finished 12th in the national women’s championship. Her interest in politics started early, beginning with membership in the youth league of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetarepartiet; SAP) at age 16 in 1983. Four years later she was elected chairperson of the organization’s Uppsala branch.

Andersson attended the Cathedral School in Uppsala before earning a B.S. in business administration and economics in 1992 from the Stockholm School of Economics, where she served as president of the Social Democratic Student Association. She continued her higher education with studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (1994) and Harvard University (1995), and she was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at the Stockholm School of Economics when she chose to forsake her graduate studies to take a position as a political adviser in the office of the prime minister, Social Democrat Göran Persson, in 1996.

Andersson then served as Persson’s director of planning from 1998 to 2004. Thereafter she became state secretary for the Ministry of Finance (2004–06), acted as the domestic policy adviser for Social Democratic leader Mona Sahlin (2007–09), and served as deputy director general of the Swedish Tax Agency (2009–12). From 2012 until 2014 Andersson was the economic policy spokesperson for the Social Democrats. After the Social Democrats won the 2014 general election, she became the minister of finance in the government of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, a position she held throughout his premiership (2014–21).

Andersson met her husband, Richard Friberg, when they were students at the Stockholm School of Economics. They married in 1997. Like Andersson, Friberg is an economist. He teaches at their alma mater. They have a son and a daughter. An outdoor enthusiast, Andersson enjoys kayaking and mountaineering. She is also known to be a fan of the heavy metal band System of a Down.

Tenure as minister of finance

Löfven’s minority government—a coalition with the Green Party, supported by the Left (former Communist) Party—had a tenuous hold on power. Nevertheless, under Andersson’s guidance, the Swedish economy grew robustly, with gross domestic product (GDP) expanding by more than 2 percent annually throughout Löfven’s tenure as prime minister. Moreover, inflation was low and unemployment decreased, falling from 7.9 percent in 2014 to 6.3 percent in April 2018. Still, crafting policies that were acceptable to the government’s supporters on both left and right was a difficult balancing act that became painfully obvious in its repeated failure to win passage in the Riksdag (parliament) for its budget.

In the meantime, support for the parties on the right in Sweden grew, especially as the popularity of the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats ballooned, largely in response to the influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa that had swelled in 2015. In September 2018 an inconclusive election was followed by Löfven’s loss of a vote of confidence and four months of a hung parliament and caretaker rule. Although Löfven headed up another minority coalition government with the Greens in January 2019, his inability to accommodate the Liberal and Left parties and his ongoing frustrated efforts to secure parliamentary approval for his budget ultimately led him to resign as leader of the Social Democrats and as prime minister in November 2021. He did so partly in the hope of allowing his successor, Andersson, to build political momentum for the upcoming September 2022 general election.

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Prime ministership

Sweden had long been at the forefront of representation of women in government and elected office, but Andersson became the country’s first female prime minister, breaking a gender barrier that had already been eliminated by all of Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbours. Shockingly, seven hours after taking office, when the Riksdag had rejected her preferred budget and instead passed one advanced by the opposition, she resigned, saying, “I don’t want to lead a government whose legitimacy will be questioned.” Some five days later, however, Andersson was back in office, this time at the head of a single-party minority government without the support of the Greens. Although only 101 of the Riksdag’s 349 members had voted to approve Andersson as prime minister, the 173 members who had voted against her (there were 75 abstentions) were two votes short of the total necessary to prevent her from taking office. Under the Swedish constitution, an individual can become prime minister as long as the candidate is not opposed by a parliamentary majority.

Andersson, whose leadership style had been likened to that of Germany’s longtime chancellor Angela Merkel, had a reputation for being blunt and direct. Her forceful presence earned Andersson the nickname the “Bulldozer.” According to one political pundit, Anders Lindberg of the newspaper Aftonbladet, elite political scientists and professors of economics said they were afraid of her. Her status as a much respected economist was buttressed in 2020 when the policy advisory committee of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) chose Andersson as its chairperson, making her the first woman to hold that post.

As she took on the mantle of prime minister, Andersson expressed three political objectives. First, she said that she was determined to lead Sweden away from the privatization of the welfare sector and to “take back democratic control of schools, healthcare and elderly care.” Second, she expressed a strong desire to make Sweden a model for the rest of the world in its approach to climate transition. Finally, she promised to end the segregation of immigrant communities and to put a stop to the growing incidences of shootings and bombings, many which were gang-related and frequently occurred in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with significant immigrant populations.

In the September 2022 parliamentary elections, the Sweden Democrats exploited concerns about that gang-related violence to capture more than 20 percent of the vote and lift the four-party right-wing bloc they formed with the Moderate Party, Christian Democrats, and Liberals to a narrow victory (176 seats to 173 seats) over the centre-left coalition led by the prime minister. Andersson’s loss of power came despite her considerable personal popularity and the fact the Social Democrats had gained seven seats to constitute the single largest party in the Riksdag. Andersson resigned as prime minister but remained at the head of a caretaker government until a new right-wing coalition government was formed in October under the leadership of Ulf Kristersson.