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".

Jonas Sjöstedt (born 25 December 1964 in Gothenburg) is a Swedish politician and the current chairman of the Left Party since 2012. He is also a member of the Swedish parliament since 2010.

Opposed to Swedish membership of the European Union, he was elected Member of the European Parliament in 1995 for the Left Party as part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left, until he stood down in September 2006. He was elected as a member in the Parliament of Sweden in 2010, representing Västerbotten.

Sjöstedt became politically active as a union leader in the Volvo plant in the city of Umeå in the early 1990s. In his 2010 bid for Parliament, he was placed number one on the Left Party list (which generally receives one representative in this constituency) and was elected in a personal landslide of one third of all preference votes (a plurality above 8 % being sufficient for a one seat-party).

Living in New York City in from 2006 to 2010, he is also a member of the Socialist Party USA, during a period he also wrote for Swedish leftist publications, radio and print columns, as well as works of history and fiction. He is married to Swedish diplomat Ann Måwe, part of the Swedish delegation to the United Nations.

Urban Bäckström (born 1955, Sollefteå, Västernorrlands län) is a Swedish economist who is the current CEO of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. He is a former Governor of the Bank of Sweden.

Born in Sollefteå, Bäckström grew up in Visby and Helsingborg and graduated with a degree in economics from Stockholm University. He is married to Ewa, who works for SAS, and the couple has two children.

Urban Bäckström started his career at the Ministry of Finance during the Thorbjörn Fälldin government. He was later the chief economist for the centre-right Moderate Party. While state secretary at the Ministry of Finance he was involved among other things in the management of Sweden's financial crisis of the early 1990s. In 1994 he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Sweden. Having resigned in 2002, he was appointed CEO of Skandia Liv, part of the Skandia group of insurance companies. In 2005 he became CEO of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, which represents larger companies and employers.

Margot Elisabeth Wallström (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾːɡɔt ˈvalːstɾœm]) (born 28 September 1954 in Skellefteå) is a Swedish social democratic politician and diplomat, currently holding the post of Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Prior to this, she served as European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication Strategy. She was also the first of five vice-presidents of the 27-member Barroso Commission.

Wallström, a high school graduate, lacking academic degrees, has had a long career in politics, in the Swedish parliament, the Swedish government and in the European Commission. She was Environment Commissioner from 1999–2004 and in the Swedish government she was Minister for Consumer Affairs, Women and Youth in 1988–1991, Minister for Culture in 1994–1996 and Minister for Social Affairs in 1996–1998. Wallström has also worked as the CEO of a regional TV network in Sweden and before taking up her appointment as Commissioner she was the executive vice-president of Worldview Global Media in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Wallström is married and has two children.

Hans Karlsson (born October 21, 1946) is a Swedish Social Democratic politician. From 2002 to 2006, he served in the Cabinet of Göran Persson as Minister for Employment in the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications of the Swedish government. His responsibilities included health and work injury insurance and sick pay.

A painter by profession, Hans Karlsson came into politics through the Swedish Painters' Union, a trade union affiliated to LO, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation. In 1975 he became branch chairman for the Örebro County branch, and in 1978 he started to work for the union. In 1986 he became Organising Secretary at LO, where he later held other posts, including Collective Bargaining Secretary.

In 1993, Karlsson was elected to the National Board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. In 2002, Prime Minister Göran Persson made him Minister for Employment.

Karlsson holds no university degree, but has studied labour market issues and labour legislation at Örebro University College (now Örebro University) in the 1970s.