Sven Olof Joachim Palme
One of the most important historical figures in Sweden is Sven Olof Joachim Palme. He (January 30, 1927 – February 28, 1986) was a Swedish politician and statesman who was Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982 to 1986. Palme was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 until his assassination in 1986.
He was a protégé of Prime Minister Tage Erlander for many years before becoming Prime Minister of Sweden in 1969, leading a Privy Council Government. He resigned after failing to form a government following the 1976 general election, which ended the Social Democratic Party's 40-year reign. He acted as a special UN mediator in the Iran-Iraq war while Leader of the Opposition, and he was President of the Nordic Council in 1979. He suffered a second setback in 1979, but he was re-elected Prime Minister in 1982 and 1985, and he served until his death.
Palme was a major and contentious figure in local and international politics beginning in the 1960s. He was staunch in his policy of non-alignment with the superpowers, which was accompanied by backing for several liberation movements following independence, including, most controversially, economic and rhetorical support for a number of Third World countries. He was the first Western head of government to visit Cuba following the revolution, and he delivered a speech in Santiago applauding contemporary Cuban revolutionaries.
He was a frequent critic of Soviet and American foreign policy, and he expressed his opposition to imperialist ambitions and authoritarian regimes such as those of Francisco Franco of Spain, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, and, most notably, John Vorster and P. W. Botha of South Africa, denouncing apartheid as a particularly gruesome system. His condemnation of the American bombings in Hanoi in 1972, in which he compared the bombings to a number of historical crimes such as the bombing of Guernica, the massacres of Oradour-Sur-glane, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice and Sharpeville, and the extermination of Jews and other groups at Treblinka, resulted in a temporary freeze in Sweden-US relations.
