Nils Olof Thorbjörn Fälldin (24 April 1926 – 23 July 2016) was a Swedish politician and farmer who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1976 to 1978 and again from 1979 to 1982. From 1971 to 1985, he was leader of the Centre Party.
Upon first taking office in 1976, he was the first non-Social Democratic prime minister in 40 years, and the first since the 1930s not having worked as a professional politician since his teens. He was also the last Swedish prime minister to not be from the Social Democrats or Moderate Party.
Nils Olof Thorbjörn Fälldin was born on 24 April 1926 in Högsjö parish, Ångermanland. He was the son of the farmer Nils Johan Fälldin and his wife Hulda (née Olsson),
who were involved in agriculturally focused political and civic associations. Fälldin grew up in a farming family in Ångermanland. He grew up on the family farm in Ramvik, which later became his home as an adult. He completed his formal schooling at the age of 19.
Fälldin worked as a sheep farmer. In 1956, he and his wife, as a newlywed young couple, took over a small farm. However, the farming authorities did not approve the purchase, as the farm was considered too small and too run down for production, and so refused to provide farm subsidies. This fight led him into the youth branch of the Swedish agrarian party Farmers' League (Bondeförbundet), which in 1958 changed its name to the Centre Party. He and his family maintained their farm throughout his political life, and when he resigned from politics in 1985, he immediately returned to it.
Fälldin entered the Swedish national political stage when he was elected to the Second Chamber of the Swedish Riksdag in 1958 for the agrarian-rooted Centre Party. He was part of a younger generation of activists within the party that wished to expand its appeal to urban voters. He was distinguished by his skepticism of social democracy and trade unions.
Fälldin lost the seat by 11 votes in 1964. He was then elected to the party board and met with local party organizations, which raised his profile among the Centrists. In 1966 he gained a seat in the First Chamber, where he befriended the leader of the Liberal Party. Fälldin then regained his Second Chamber seat in 1968. In that election, the Centre Party overtook the Liberals as the second-largest party.
Competing against his rival Johannes Antonsson, he won a party election to became vice-chairman of the party in 1969. Fälldin was able to secure the position without the support of the chairman, Gunnar Hedlund. For the 1970 general election, the Centre Party adopted a new platform that sought to expand the party's appeal to the urban working class, and advocated for decentralization and wage equality between industrial and agricultural workers. The party again came in second, with 19.9%, an increase from the previous election.
In 1971, Fälldin succeeded Hedlund as party chairman. This made him the leader of the largest opposition party, and thus the frontrunner for prime minister from the nonsocialist bloc. Also in 1971 he became a member of the new unicameral Riksdag that replaced the bicameral. With Fälldin's ascension to the leadership, criticism of the Social Democratic Party increased.
In 1970 and 1971, the Social Democratic government proposed a plan to construct eleven nuclear reactors, which was approved nearly unanimously by the Riksdag. However, by 1973, Fälldin adopted a strong anti-nuclear stance due to his interactions with the scientist Hannes Alfvén and the anti-nuclear Centrist politician Birgitta Hambraeus. Around the same time, the government of Social Democratic prime minister Olof Palme had proposed a plan to develop 15 nuclear reactors by 1985 in response to the 1973 oil crisis, which was opposed to Fälldin's vision of a "green revolution". The Centre Party was thus the only major political party in an industrialized western country of the 1970s to take an anti-nuclear stance.
During the 1973 general election, Fälldin held a live televised debate against Social Democratic party leader and prime minister Olof Palme, which were in the process of becoming a staple of Swedish politics. The members of the nonsocialist bloc emphasized different policies. Fälldin and the Centrists pushed for decentralisation, while the Liberals emphasized environmental and tax policies, and the Moderate Party placed focus on tax and educational reforms. Fälldin also accused the Social Democrats of failing to fight unemployment. Although Fälldin had recently adopted his anti-nuclear stance, nuclear power was not a major issue in the 1973 election, only first becoming a major issue in the time between the 1973 and 1976 elections.
That year, Fälldin proposed that the party should merge with the Liberal Party, but he failed to gain the support of a majority of party members. The Centre Party received 25.1% of the votes that year, their highest share for a Riksdag election up to that point and since. Both the socialist and non-socialist blocs each received 175 seats, with Palme's Social Democrats remaining in power due to the support of the Communist Party and winning drawings to end ties. The difference in votes between the blocs was over 3,700.
During the 1976 election, Fälldin again debated Palme. Although Palme was perceived as a better debater, Fälldin was perceived as a having won more sympathy with voters, contrasting with Palme's aggressive style. In particular, Fälldin emotionally criticized the government's proposed nuclear power program, which has been described as a turning point in the Centrists' favor. This also complicated the non-socialist coalition talks, as the Liberals and the Moderates had supported the government's nuclear program. Due to this, the Liberals and Moderates placed little to no emphasis on nuclear energy during the campaign, in sharp contrast to its heavy emphasis in the Centrist ads. The three parties initially agreed to a two-year pause on orders for new nuclear reactors.
During the campaign, Fälldin's political opponents praised him for honesty and similarities to rural voters, but criticized his lack of foreign policy experience and his inability to understand English. Sweden had a strong economy, which the Social Democrats touted, while stating that the opposition would cut back on the country's expansive welfare programs. The nonsocialists denied that they would remove social benefits, and criticized the country's high direct taxation.
In the election, the Social Democrats finally lost power, having governed the country for the past 44 years. The Centre party's percentage dropped slightly from the previous election, garnering 24.1%, and lost four seats, bringing their total to 86. The party had seen its share of the vote increase in every election from 1956 to 1973, with a small recession in 1964. The 1976 election would begin a consistent trend of decreases in the party's vote share, and was the last time that the Centre was the largest nonsocialist party. The nonsocialist bloc won 180 Riksdag seats combined, while Palme's Social Democrats and the Left Party obtained 169 seats. The non-Socialist parties (the Centre Party, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Moderate Party) formed a coalition government, and, as the Centre Party was the largest of the three, Fälldin was elected prime minister by the Riksdag and confirmed by king Carl XVI Gustaf during a Council of State, being the first person appointed in this manner under the new 1974 Instrument of Government.
Fälldin's initial tenure was the first time a member of the Centre Party headed a Swedish government since Axel Pehrsson-Bramstorp's brief government forty years earlier, in 1936. Fälldin and his first government took office on 7 October 1976. It consisted of 8 Centrists, 6 Moderates, 5 Liberals, and the independent minister of justice. Fälldin appointed Liberal leader Per Ahlmark to the newly created position of deputy prime minister and as minister for employment. Moderate Party leader Gösta Bohman became the finance minister. He also appointed fellow Centrist Karin Söder to serve as foreign minister, making her the first woman to hold that role. There were four other women in the cabinet. He also made the anti-nuclear Olof Johansson the energy minister. Ahlmark left party politics in March of 1978, and was succeeded as deputy prime minister by the new Liberal leader, Ola Ullsten.