Midsummer Crisis 2021 — First Successful No-Confidence Vote
On 21 June 2021 the Riksdag voted 181 to 109 to remove Stefan Löfven as prime minister after Nooshi Dadgostar's Left Party withdrew support over a January Agreement inquiry into market-based rents — the first successful misstroendeförklaring against a sitting Swedish PM and the structural prelude to the November 2021 handover to Magdalena Andersson.
- Confirmation Economy V Brought down a sitting Social Democratic prime minister over market-rate rents — the first no-confidence vote to succeed.
Why this verdict?
V had repeatedly stated that market-rate rents (marknadshyror) were an absolute red line: if the government pursued them, V would file a no-confidence motion. The housing inquiry in the January Agreement triggered exactly this. V did what they said they would do, on the timeline they stated. Confirmation.
The Midsommarkrisen of June 2021 was the first time in Swedish constitutional history that a sitting prime minister was removed by a Riksdag misstroendeförklaring (declaration of no confidence). The vote on 21 June 2021 was 181 in favour, 109 against, and 51 abstaining — well above the 175 needed to bring down Stefan Löfven and the Löfven II cabinet.
The trigger was structural rather than scandalous. Nooshi Dadgostar’s Left Party had tolerated the government since 2019 only on the explicit promise that point 44 of the January Agreement — market-based rents in newly built apartments — would not move against her party’s objection. On 15 June 2021 V concluded that the inquiry’s direction violated the promise and withdrew support. SD filed the motion; M and KD joined; V’s votes carried it across the line.
The vote demonstrated that the Januariavtalet compatibility regime was fundamentally fragile: a cross-bloc tolerance pact could be broken from the left as well as from the right. On 28 June Löfven declined a snap election and announced he would resign. The transition that followed — Löfven III briefly, then the November 2021 handover to Magdalena Andersson — became the structural prelude to the 2022 Tidö Agreement.
Related entities
On the values timeline
- 1990Economy · In 1990 the party dropped 'the Communists' from its name and removed communism from its programme, becoming simply the Left Party.
- 2008Economy · In December 2008 the Left Party committed for the first time to join a binding Red-Green coalition government with the Social Democrats and Greens if they won the 2010 election.
- you are here2021Economy · Brought down a sitting Social Democratic prime minister over market-rate rents — the first no-confidence vote to succeed.
- 2024EU · At its May 2024 congress in Jönköping the Left Party dropped its long-standing active demand that Sweden leave the EU, keeping exit only as a last resort.
- 2024Security & defence · After Sweden joined NATO in 2024, the Left Party stopped demanding an immediate exit and accepted membership as a reality, while pushing to keep distance and bar nuclear weapons.
- C1995After governing in the centre-right Bildt cabinet, Centerpartiet crossed the bloc line in spring 1995 and entered close budget cooperation with the Social Democrats, taking shared responsibility for the austerity package that consolidated state finances through 1998.
- S1997Under Goran Persson, the Social Democrats made budget consolidation and a public-finance surplus target the core of fiscal policy by 1997, subordinating their older deficit-spending tradition.
- M2006Reinvented as "the New Moderates", accepting the welfare state to win the centre.
- MP2019To stay in government after the 2018 deadlock, the Greens signed the 73-point January Agreement in 2019 and accepted market-liberal reforms they had earlier resisted, including inquiries into market rents and looser labour rules.