Fälldin I Cabinet 1976–1978
First non-socialist government in Sweden since 1936 — a Centerpartiet–Liberal–Moderate coalition under Thorbjörn Fälldin with 180 Riksdag seats. It broke 40 years of unbroken Social Democratic rule, was hit by the 1977 Geijer affair, and collapsed in October 1978 over nuclear power.
The Fälldin I Cabinet, headed by Thorbjörn Fälldin, took office on 8 October 1976 as a three-party coalition between Centerpartiet, the Liberal People’s Party (today’s Liberalerna), and Moderaterna — together holding 180 seats in the unicameral Riksdag. It was the first non-socialist majority government in Sweden since the 1936 sommarregering, ending forty years of unbroken Social Democratic rule and producing the first real maktskifte of the post-war era.
In office the cabinet kept the Keynesian welfare model running through the global recession of the late 1970s. It created the state-owned Svenska Varv AB in 1977 to absorb a wave of failing yards including Götaverken and Karlskronavarvet during the international shipbuilding crisis. The same year produced the Geijer affair: Dagens Nyheter exposed a long-suppressed police memo alleging that former Social Democratic justice minister Lennart Geijer was a security risk, igniting a cross-party cover-up scandal that the Fälldin cabinet had to manage on inheritance.
Read in retrospect, the cabinet’s main achievement was symbolic: it proved that a centre-right coalition could form and govern at all. Its main weakness was structural: the three parties never resolved the nuclear-power question that had been central to Centerpartiet’s 1976 campaign. The cabinet resigned on 18 October 1978 over exactly that question, handing the premiership to Liberal deputy Ola Ullsten and the Ullsten cabinet.