Shot Dead in the Street

The story of Olof Palme, Sweden's social democratic Prime Minister assassinated on this day in 1986

The Cold War pressured smaller countries to ‘pick a side’ between the rival superpowers.
 
This involved moral compromises and hypocrisy, with politicians turning a blind eye to the moral outrages of their own ‘camp’.
 
The allies of the Soviet Union were made to fall in line with the invasion of Afghanistan, while America’s partners were pressured to support the invasion of Vietnam.
 
And moves toward neutrality or non-alignment were violently punished by the two hegemons. 
 
The Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 just because its reformist government planned to exit the Warsaw Pact, the Communist version of NATO.

But some states managed to avoid the Manichean logic of the Cold War.

Skilful politicians in the postcolonial world, like Colonel Nasser in Egypt, were able to play the Americans and Soviets off against each other, making space for some strategic autonomy. 
 
And Yugoslavia carved its own path through the Cold War after Tito’s dramatic split with Stalin in 1948.
 
But perhaps the most promising and durable model of non-alignment was social democratic Sweden – and few capture this project better than the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme.
 
Palme, who governed Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982 to 1986, helped shape a national tradition of radical social democracy at home, built on progressive taxation and ambitious nationalisation, and a moral foreign policy independent of the two superpowers.

Olof Palme himself had an untypical background for a firebrand social democrat. 
 
He was born in 1927 into the Swedish ruling class, the son of a wealthy Lutheran family in Stockholm. 
 
But Palme grew interested in socialist politics through his university studies, as well as by travelling in Asia during the years of anticolonial revolution after WW2. 
 
Back home, he joined the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1949 and was quickly promoted up the ranks.
 
By 1953, Palme was already personal secretary to the SDP Prime Minister, Tage Erlander.
 
Over the next fifteen years, he held various ministerial positions until he replaced Erlander as PM in 1969.

Governing Sweden during the 1970s and 1980s, a period of major defeats for the working class elsewhere in Europe, Olof Palme oversaw the opposite. 
 
His government increased the rights of trade unions and expanded the Swedish welfare state, funded by an unapologetic system of progressive taxation. 
 
At a time when countless governments were falling to neoliberalism and its privatisation dogma, Palme’s Sweden maintained a firmly mixed economy, with key sectors kept safely under public ownership.
 
Externally, the most dramatic feature of Palme’s premiership was his radical foreign policy – especially by the standards of a European government – based on the principles of national self-determination and human rights. 
 
Palme turned Sweden into a global advocate for anti-colonialism during the Cold War.
 
He denounced apartheid South Africa, a key member of the Western Cold War alliance system. 
 
He also condemned the U.S. invasion of Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s, leading to numerous diplomatic fights with Washington.