Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson becomes the first woman to become Swedish Prime Minister.
The previous finance minister received the necessary support on Wednesday during a vote in the Swedish parliament to succeed the resigned Prime Minister Stefan Löfven.
Andersson was enough that no majority in the Stockholm Reichstag spoke out against her: 174 members of parliament voted against her - 175 votes against in the 349-seat parliament would have been necessary to block her way into office.
The 54-year-old politician succeeds her party friend Stefan Löfven, who had ruled Sweden for the past seven years with a red-green minority government.
It is expected that Andersson will present the new red-green government on Friday.
Tape crime and corona
Löfven announced in August that he would retire first as party chairman and then as prime minister.
At the beginning of November, the 64-year-old politician passed the party chairmanship on to Andersson, before he also submitted his resignation as prime minister to parliamentary speaker Andreas Norlén two weeks ago.
With his withdrawal, Löfven wants to give his successor the opportunity to position himself better before the next parliamentary election in Sweden in late summer 2022. Andersson also inherits several problems from him: On the one hand, the corona pandemic, in which Sweden chose a special route with comparatively looser measures, is still far from over in the far north of the EU. On the other hand, the Scandinavian country has been wrestling with rampant gang crime for a long time.
The majority structure in the Swedish Reichstag has also been extremely fragile since the rise of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats: together, red-green only has 116 of the 349 seats in parliament, so the opposition could have blocked Andersson's way with a clear majority.
The Center Party and the Left, who had also waved Löfven through in such a vote in the summer, abstained.
This just confirmed Andersson.