Mona Sahlin
Swedish social-democratic politician who came within weeks of becoming Sweden's first female prime minister in 1995 before withdrawing under the Toblerone affair, later returned as the first woman to lead the Social Democrats (2007–2011), built the Red–Green opposition alliance against the Reinfeldt Alliance, and lost the 2010 election that also brought the Sweden Democrats into the Riksdag.
Mona Sahlin was, in the autumn of 1995, the politician most Swedes expected to follow Ingvar Carlsson into the prime minister’s office. As Deputy Prime Minister and Equal Affairs Minister in Carlsson III, she had been groomed as Carlsson’s natural heir; her election as party leader was widely regarded as a formality. Then Expressen disclosed that she had used a government credit card for private purchases — a Toblerone bar among them — and a story that on paper concerned a few thousand kronor became the political event that closed off Sweden’s first credible path to a female head of government for nearly two decades.
She withdrew from the leadership race. Göran Persson took the party and the premiership. Whether the Toblerone affair was the cause or the pretext became the central interpretive dispute of 1990s Swedish political memory. The prosecutor’s office closed the investigation without charges in 1996.
Sahlin re-entered the cabinet under Persson — Industry, Employment, Communications, and Integration portfolios across the 1998 and 2002 mandates — and after the 2006 defeat finally took the party leadership at the 2007 extra congress, becoming the first woman to lead Socialdemokraterna. As leader she built the Rödgröna alliance with the Left Party and the Greens, the most formal pre-election bloc in modern Swedish politics, framed explicitly against the Reinfeldt Alliance. The 2010 election produced a historic SAP low and the breakthrough of the Sweden Democrats into the Riksdag. Sahlin resigned in March 2011.