Göran Persson
Göran Persson was prime minister of Sweden from 1996 to 2006, ten years, the Social Democrat finance minister who had cleaned up the crisis of the early 1990s, when the banks failed, the krona was floated and the deficit reached twelve per cent, with a consolidation of a hundred and twenty billion kronor in cuts and taxes that took the debt from eighty per cent of output to forty and made the Swedish model solvent again. As prime minister he kept the surplus, put the budget on a ceiling, took the pension system from defined benefit to notional accounts. He kept Sweden out of the euro when the referendum of 2003 said no by fourteen points, days after the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death in a department store. He won three elections before losing the fourth, in 2006, to Reinfeldt's rebranded moderates. He was born in Vingaker in Sodermanland in 1949, a builder's son, left university without a degree for the party's youth wing, was a municipal commissioner in Katrineholm through the 1980s, where he ran the town like a company. He was Carlsson's schools minister in 1989-91, when he decentralised the schools to the municipalities, and his finance minister from 1994. He took the party's leadership and the premiership when Carlsson retired in March 1996, saying that one who is in debt is not free, which was the sentence of the decade. The governments were the recovery, with unemployment falling from ten per cent to four, the maximum childcare fee, the Oresund bridge to Denmark in 2000. There was the Swedish presidency of the European Union in 2001 in which the Gothenburg summit ended in riots and police gunfire, the enlargement of 2004 that Sweden opened its labour market to on the first day, and there was the tsunami of December 2004 that killed five hundred and forty-three Swedes in Thailand, for which the government's slow response was the beginning of its end. He left the leadership after the defeat of September 2006, farmed in Sodermanland, wrote a memoir and lobbied. He has chaired Swedbank since 2019.
- Lived: 1949 CE – ?
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
