Olof Palme
Olof Palme was an upper-class Stockholm boy who led Sweden's Social Democrats for seventeen years, said what no other Western prime minister would say about Vietnam, South Africa and the bomb, and was shot dead on a street in the capital walking home from the cinema without a bodyguard; the murder is unsolved and the country has never been the same about itself since. He was born in 1927 into a conservative family of insurance money, was educated at Kenyon College in Ohio on a scholarship, hitchhiked through the American South and came home a socialist, read law, and was from 1953 the secretary and then the protégé of the prime minister Tage Erlander, whom he succeeded in October 1969. He governed for seven years at the height of the Swedish model - the wage-earner funds argued over, the welfare state extended, the constitution rewritten to leave the king nothing - and lost the election of 1976, the first the party had lost in forty-four years, over nuclear power and taxes. Abroad he was the voice. He marched beside the North Vietnamese ambassador in 1968, compared the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 to Guernica and Treblinka, which cost Sweden its American ambassador for a year. He funded the ANC and the liberation movements of southern Africa, went to Nicaragua, and chaired the commission on common security that gave the phrase to the Cold War's end, and was the UN's mediator between Iran and Iraq. He came back in 1982 with a devaluation and a quieter programme, and was governing when, at twenty past eleven on the night of 28 February 1986, a man walked up behind him and his wife on Sveavägen and shot him once in the back. A drifter was convicted in 1989 and acquitted on appeal. In 2020 the prosecutor named a dead advertising man who had been at the scene and closed the case without a trial, which satisfied nobody. Sweden had not had a political murder since Gustav III.
- Lived: 1927 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: prime_minister, politician
