Hans Göran Persson (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈʝœːran ˈpæːʂɔn]) (born 20 January 1949) was the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1996 to 2006 and the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1996 to 2007. He was Minister for Finance from 1994 to 1996.

Conceding defeat in the September 2006 general election, he announced that he would resign as party leader, and Mona Sahlin was elected to succeed him as party leader in March 2007. Since August 2007 he has worked as a part time corporate lobbyist for the JKL Group.^{[citation needed]}

Persson was born in Vingåker in Södermanland, Sweden, in a working-class home. He has in recent years revealed that he wanted to become a priest as a young man; however, he applied to the college in Örebro where he took courses in social science (mainly sociology). He completed 80 college credits (120 ECTS credits) in the subject before he left the college in 1971 without graduating. According to himself he had at the time almost completed an education in social and political sciences.^{[citation needed]} As the college later received credentials as a full university, the renamed Örebro University gave him an honorary PhD in medicine in February 2005, an award that provoked some controversy.

John Fredrik Reinfeldt (pronounced [ˈfreːdrɪk ˈrajnˌfɛlt] ( listen); born 4 August 1965) is the Prime Minister of Sweden, leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party and former President of the European Council.

A native of Stockholm County, Reinfeldt joined the Moderate Youth League in 1983, and by 1992 had risen to the rank of chairman, a position he held until 1995. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1991, representing his home constituency. Following the 1994 defeat of the Moderate-led coalition government, Reinfeldt adopted a critical stance against the party leadership under Carl Bildt, which resulted in isolation within the party. However, following a change of leadership in 1999 and a bad result in the 2002 election, Reinfeldt gradually gained influence within the Moderate Party.

Reinfeldt was elected party leader on 25 October 2003, succeeding Bo Lundgren. Under his leadership, the Moderate Party has transformed its policies and oriented towards the centre, branding itself "the New Moderates" (Swedish: Nya moderaterna). Following the general elections held on 17 September 2006, Reinfeldt was elected Prime Minister by the new parliament on 5 October and presented his cabinet the following day. Together with the three other political parties in the centre-right Alliance for Sweden, Reinfeldt presides over a coalition government with the support of a narrow majority in the parliament. At the age of 41, he was the third youngest person to become Prime Minister of Sweden. After the 2010 election Reinfeldt's government was reduced to a minority government but also becoming the first centre-right government since before World War II to be re-elected, making Reinfeldt the first Moderate politician elected to two consecutive terms as Prime Minister. He is also the longest-serving Moderate Prime Minister in Swedish history.

Bo Axel Magnus Lundgren (born July 11, 1947) is a Swedish politician. He is the former leader of the Moderate Party. Lundgren was born in Kristianstad in Skåne. Between 1991 and 1994, he served as Deputy Minister of Finance with special responsibility for taxation. He was also Minister for Sport.

He was elected party leader by the 1999 party congress, succeeding Carl Bildt, but resigned only four years later in 2003, following poor results in the Swedish parliamentary election in 2002. He was succeeded by the pragmatist Fredrik Reinfeldt. During the elections, Lundgren was perceived to be a technocratic politician who put a little too much emphasis on budget numbers and specific tax cuts, which might have contributed to the party's poor showing that year.^{[citation needed]} He was criticised for promising to cut taxes by 130 billion Swedish kronor, a vision that according to his opponents might have jeopardised the welfare state, although the number seems to have been calculated by political opponents.

Nils Daniel Carl Bildt KCMG (born 15 July 1949) is a Swedish politician and diplomat who was Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999. He has served as Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs since 6 October 2006.

Bildt has also been noted internationally as a mediator in the Balkan conflict, serving as the European Union's Special Envoy to the Former Yugoslavia from June 1995, co-chairman of the Dayton Peace Conference in November 1995 and as High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from December 1995 to June 1997 immediately after the Bosnian War. From 1999 to 2001, he served as the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Balkans.

Bildt was born in Halmstad, Halland, and belongs to an old Norwegian-Danish-Swedish noble family traditionally domiciled in Bohus county. Bildt attended Stockholm University but never graduated. His great-great-grandfather, Baron Gillis Bildt, served as Prime Minister a century earlier and as a diplomat as well as Marshal of the Realm of Sweden (riksmarskalk). His great-grandfather, General Knut Bildt, was chief of the general staff. His great-grandfather's brother Carl Bildt served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Cabinet - Secretary (Under secretary of state of foreign affairs, in Swedish kabinettssekreterare) and was a renowned diplomat and member of the Swedish Academy. Bildt's grandfather Nils Bildt was a colonel and chief of the Halland Regiment. Colonel Bildt and his family were neighbours to the Palme family. Bildt's father Daniel Bildt (1920–2010) was a former major in the reserves of the now defunct Halland Regiment (Hallands regemente) and a former bureau director in the now defunct Civil Defense Board's Education Bureau. He married Kerstin Andersson-Alwå in 1947.

Gudrun Schyman (born 9 June 1948, Täby, Uppland) is a Swedish politician. She served as leader of the Swedish Left Party from 1993 until January 2003. She remained a member of the Left Party until 2004, when she left to focus entirely on her feminist political work. She remained a member of parliament until 2006.

In 1993 Schyman was elected party leader for the Left Party.

Schyman's greatest asset was her appeal to the voters, and her party more than doubled its number of MPs during her leadership. She gained popularity for her candor; for example, she is open about her struggle with alcoholism and has supported the initiative to make the Riksdag an alcohol-free workplace. During her period as party president, the party adopted feminism as an ideological basis. In 2003 she was charged with misleading the tax authorities by attempting to take illicit tax deductions. She was temporarily succeeded by Ulla Hoffmann.

In 2002 she made a controversial speech concerning men's oppression of women, in which she said "The discrimination and the violations appears in different shapes depending on where we find ourselves. But it's the same norm, the same structure, the same pattern, that is repeated both in the Taliban's Afghanistan and here in Sweden".