A party congress in Gothenburg said on Thursday with a unanimous “Yes!” for the 54-year-old. She succeeds Prime Minister Stefan Löfven at the party leadership. Andersson could now become the first woman in Swedish history to become prime minister as soon as Löfven resigns from the country’s highest political office after the party congress.
However, the fact that the minister will become the new head of government is anything but a foregone conclusion. So that she can inherit Löfven in the office, it is necessary that she survive a vote in parliament after he is expected to resign. It would be enough for her that no parliamentary majority speaks against her.
To do this, however, their social democrats and the co-governing Greens need the votes of the left and the center – and these two parties have already made demands for such support. She will hold talks with the parties that could support her, said Andersson at a press conference shortly after her election.
When exactly Löfven will submit his resignation to the President of Parliament Andreas Norlén, he has left open until the end. During the party congress he only said that he would give notice of this by the end of the week.
In her acceptance speech, Andersson said to the continued applause of her party friends: “I feel great humility in front of the task, but above all I am enormously motivated to lead our big and proud party.”
The move to the top of the party does not come as a surprise. Löfven, head of the party since 2012 and head of government since 2014, announced in August that he would give up the office of party chairman and subsequently also the post of prime minister. After seven years at the head of the government and a long period of complicated majority relationships in the Swedish Reichstag, he wanted his successor to be in a position to position herself before the next parliamentary election in September 2022.
All 26 district associations of the Social Democrats had then spoken out in favor of Andersson as Löfven’s successor. At the end of September, the party’s electoral committee proposed her as the new chairman. “Magdalena Andersson knows what it is like, says how it is, and does what is required,” said the committee leader Elvy Söderström at the time.
Andersson has been finance minister in Löfven’s red-green minority government since 2014. The social democrat comes from Uppsala north of Stockholm and is a trained economist. She is married to a university professor and has two grown children.