The triumph of a moderate

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who was re-elected on Sunday, is serious, discreet, collected ... in a word, a moderate, the name of the political party he’s headed since 2003.

The 45-year-old father of three is known to lead a well-organised and settled existence, with a Saab in the garage of his house in the suburbs of Stockholm.

Married to a fellow Moderate politician, he has said he gets his kicks out of football and Swedish hot-dogs and doesn’t mind doing the chores at home.

“I like things to be clean,” he once said about his kitchen, a statement a lot have said sums up his personality.

Born August 4, 1965, the eldest of four children, he studied economics at Stockholm University and quickly became a career politician, like most of Sweden’s political class.

He was voted into the Swedish parliament in 1991, and headed the Modarates’ youth organisation from 1992 to 1995.

During that time, he tried to shake things up within the party, calling in a book entitled The Sleeping Nation for a liberal electrochoc to wake up Swedes.

In 1995, he lashed out the party’s top brass and the entourage of Carl Bildt, who had just been ousted as prime minister, and as a result Mr Reinfeldt was kept away from significant posts for four years.

“They treated me like I had the plague,” he later wrote.

But when the Moderates suffered a big election blow in 2002, Reinfeldt quickly bounced back from his forced break and became party leader in 2003.

He softened his rightwing image and toned down criticism of Sweden’s cherished welfare state, adopted more consensual and centrist policies, and gained in popularity with his reflective, attentive nature.

In the 2006 election, he formed a centre-right coalition with the Liberal, Centre and Christian Democrat parties, promising tax cuts and branding the Moderates as Sweden’s “true labour party” to oust Goeran Persson’s tired Social Democratic government.