page_title: Mona Sahlin
section_title: Social Democratic Party leadership
hierarchical_section_title: Mona Sahlin / Political career / Social Democratic Party leadership
caption_attribution_description: Svenska: Fr.v. sv:Åsa Westlund, sv:Olle Ludvigsson, sv:Marita Ulvskog, sv:Mona Sahlin och sv:Göran Färm i Västerås inför EU-valet.
context_page_description: Mona Ingeborg Sahlin is a Swedish politician who was leader of the opposition and leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 2007 to 2011.
  Sahlin was a Member of Parliament, representing Stockholm County, from 1982 to 1996 and again from 2002 to 2011. She has also held various ministerial posts in the Swedish government from 1990 to 1991, from 1994 to 1995 and from 1998 to 2006. Sahlin was elected new leader of the Social Democratic Party on 17 March 2007, succeeding Göran Persson who resigned as leader following the defeat in the 2006 general election. Sahlin is the first female leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and became in 2011 the first since Claes Tholin in 1907 to leave that position without having served as Prime Minister of Sweden. In 2012, her successor Håkan Juholt joined her as the second now living person to do so. On 14 November 2010, following another electoral defeat for the Social Democrats, she announced her intent to step down as party chairman, which she did in early 2011.
context_section_description: After the Social Democratic defeat in the 2006 election, Göran Persson announced his retirement as party leader on the election night. It was clear that the party now wanted a female leader. Mona Sahlin was mentioned as a possible successor, but not considered to be the most likely candidate. Both Margot Wallström and Carin Jämtin received stronger support amongst local and regional party organisations. Ulrica Messing was also mentioned as a possible candidate. Wallström, Jämtin and Messing declared however that they would not stand for the post and instead supported Sahlin, leaving Mona Sahlin as the only serious candidate. On 18 January she was officially asked by the party's Election Committee to stand as party leader, and accepted. On 17 March she was unanimously elected at the extra party congress in Stockholm.
  In January 2007, support for the new centre-right government of Sweden had dropped greatly in the polls, which showed the left bloc (including the Green Party) as having much stronger support. This provided Mona Sahlin, as leader of the biggest opposition party, with excellent opportunities to lead the opposition against the PM Fredrik Reinfeldt.
  By April 2009 however, the support had waned and a Demoskop poll published in Expressen showed that the four-party Alliance claimed a combined 50 percent voter support while the Sahlin-led opposition had 45.2 percent. Later the same month a Sifo poll showed that merely 27 percent of Swedes were confident or extremely confident in her leadership ability, while the public confidence in Reinfeldt was measured at 60 percent.
  Mona Sahlin is often described as a scion of the party's more moderate members, and a number of left-wing party members criticised her candidacy for party leader. Much of this criticism was silenced in January 2007 when the chairman of the Trade Union Confederation, Wanja Lundby-Wedin, expressed full support for Sahlin as well as several powerful party districts around the country. One of her key initiatives was the formation of the Red-Green alliance between the Social Democrats and the Green Party to counter the move to pare back the social welfare system and privatize state-owned assets.
  In the election to the European Parliament held on 7 June 2009 – Sahlin's first election as party leader – the Social Democratic Party received 24.41 percent of the votes (a slight reduction from the 2004 election in which the party received 24.56 percent). The result was the lowest for the Social Democratic Party since the introduction of universal suffrage in Sweden in 1921. In a speech before trade unionists during the election campaign on 12 May 2009, Sahlin said: "If there's not a plus in front of our figures it's a deep failure".
  She led the Social Democratic Party in the election of September 2010 where she failed to unseat Fredrik Reinfeldt as Prime Minister. The Social Democrats received the lowest recorded percentage of the votes in their long history but were still the largest party in Sweden by a slim margin in 2010.  She resigned as party leader on 25 March 2011, becoming the second Social Democratic Party leader to have resigned without having served as prime minister.
  Speaking in 2005 at a Swedish mosque, Sahlin said that "many Swedes are envious of immigrants because they have a culture, a history, something that binds them together. Swedes have only Midsummer Night and such silly things." Karen Jespersen, a former Minister of Integration in Denmark, commented: Cultural self-denial cannot easily be more monstrous and ghastly." After the terrorist action in Brussels in March 2016, Sahlin, who was then serving as national coordinator against violent extremism, maintained in an op-ed that such atrocities were the fault not only of the terrorists themselves but of critics of Islam whose remarks in online chat rooms, in comments fields, and on social media "give the extremists their nourishment." Commentator Jenny Sonesson called for her to be dismissed from her position, saying that she "knows nothing about Islam." Writing in Expressen, Sakine Madon al
caption: Mona Sahlin (second from the right) and the top Social Democratic Party candidates for the European Parliament elections in 2009.
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