Ullsten Cabinet 1978–1979
Single-party Folkpartiet caretaker minority under Ola Ullsten that bridged the gap between the collapse of the Fälldin I coalition over nuclear power in October 1978 and the September 1979 general election. The smallest cabinet of the era — and the one that absorbed the second oil shock.
The Ullsten Cabinet, headed by Ola Ullsten, took office on 18 October 1978 as a single-party minority government from Folkpartiet — the Liberal People’s Party that today operates as Liberalerna. It was a caretaker arrangement formed within hours of the collapse of the Fälldin I cabinet over the nuclear-power question that the centre-right coalition had failed to resolve.
The cabinet’s parliamentary basis was unusually thin even for Swedish minority politics: Folkpartiet was the smallest of the three former coalition partners, and the cabinet survived only because neither the bourgeois bloc nor the Social Democrats wanted an immediate election. Its substantive period was dominated by the second oil crisis triggered by the 1979 Iranian revolution, which prolonged the international shipping recession that had already produced the Svenska Varv intervention under Fälldin I.
The cabinet matters less for what it did than for what it represented: a one-party Folkpartiet premiership at a moment when no other formula existed. It dissolved into the September 1979 general election, after which Thorbjörn Fälldin returned at the head of the Fälldin II cabinet and the bourgeois bloc reformed.