Gro Harlem Brundtland
Gro Harlem Brundtland was prime minister of Norway three times, for nine months in 1981 as the first woman to hold the office and the youngest, from 1986 to 1989, and from 1990 to 1996, a physician who came into politics as environment minister in 1974, chaired the United Nations commission whose report of 1987 gave the world the phrase sustainable development, appointed in 1986 a cabinet in which eight of eighteen ministers were women, which no government had done, lost the referendum on joining the European Union in 1994 that she had staked her reputation on, and went on to run the World Health Organisation for five years, where she took on the tobacco companies and the SARS epidemic. The Norwegians called her landsmoderen, the mother of the country. She was born in Oslo in 1939, the daughter of a doctor who was a Labour cabinet minister, qualified in medicine at Oslo and took a master's in public health at Harvard, and was a doctor in the Oslo school health service when the prime minister asked her to be environment minister at thirty-five, in the years the oil was found and the first quarrel about it was over what it would do to the fjords. She took the Labour leadership in 1981 and the office in February. She lost the election in October. The second government from 1986 governed a country in an oil-price collapse with austerity and an incomes policy the unions accepted from her. The third, from 1990, took Norway into the European Economic Area, negotiated the terms of membership, and lost the referendum of November 1994 by fifty-two to forty-eight, the second time the Norwegians had said no. The World Commission on Environment and Development, which she chaired from 1983, defined its subject as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own, and Our Common Future was the text the Rio summit of 1992 was built on. Her son killed himself in 1992 and she stayed in office. She resigned in October 1996 without losing an election, was director-general of the WHO from 1998 to 2003, and has been a member of the Elders and a United Nations envoy on climate change since. She lives in the south of France and Oslo.
- Lived: 1939 CE – ?
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: prime minister, politician, physician
