Meet the most powerful woman in Sweden
STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s nail-biting election battle will come down to which prime minister candidate can cobble together a coalition with majority support in a new parliament that looks likely to be split almost equally between left and right.
And that makes Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist perhaps the most powerful woman in the country, for now at least.
She is the leader of the small, liberal Center Party, which is projected to win 25 seats in Sweden’s 349-member parliament.
Those two dozen or so votes in the Riksdag would be invaluable to both rivals for the job of prime minister.
Center-right incumbent Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is scrambling to try to keep his job and won’t concede until he has tried everything. He’s now widely expected to try to tempt Thand Ringqvist to join his bloc, perhaps offering sweeteners in keeping with her business-friendly agenda, and arguing that she doesn’t really want to work with socialists and the far left.
Until now, she has been aligned with the opposition side — a bloc of four parties led by center-left Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson. The most likely first step remains for the Center Party to work toward a deal with Andersson’s left-wing grouping.
But, like everything else in Sweden’s coalition-building process, it’s complicated — and there’s history.
Thand Ringqvist tends to make one overriding point above others when asked which parties she could team up with: She won’t let politicians on the extreme edges of the left or the far right force the mainstream parties to dance to their tune.
“We are ready to form a government with others,” she said as votes were being counted on election night. But she warned: “The fringes should not dominate a government.”
In practical terms, she has refused to work with the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, who Kristersson needs on his side to have any hope of winning.
But she has also ruled out working with the former communists in the Left Party, who Andersson is likewise dependent upon for a majority. The Left Party, which will be emboldened by a bigger haul of seats, has said the price of its support is having ministers in the government — and that’s too far for Thand Ringqvist.
Unlike Kristersson, who has led his Moderate Party since 2017, or Andersson, who was prime minister and lost power in 2022, Thand Ringqvist is not a veteran operator with a long record of deal-making in parliament.
The 54-year-old former lobbyist was first elected in 2022 and has been leader of her party only since November last year.
For now, she is keeping her counsel. Votes are still being counted, and the final seat tally won’t be known before Wednesday. Parliament won’t meet to vote on who could be prime minister until Sept. 29 at the earliest.
In time, however, she will have to choose. There are many crisscrossing red lines in play among the eight parties — and leaders, in the end, tend to find ways to compromise. If they can’t, Sweden may not get a government at all.
