Olof Palme have always for me just been about his murder, as a citizens in a neighboring country who was only a small child when Palme died and who grew up in a Social Democratic family, he was more a martyr or secular saint than a politician.
But it does raise the question; as a prime minister and more important social democrat, what was so good about him? He worsen the relationship with USA which in hindsight and what we know about USSR was a terrible idea, was the first social democrat in forty years who lost. He threw journalists in prison, and he gave into hostage takers.
The martyr mythologizing thing is really true. He had a lot of good takes on foreign policy, and his first seven years were progressive on expanding the welfare state, but he was also the one who presided over the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and his last four years were rather mediocre.
Like you said, he came within an inch of losing the 1973 election, then actually lost the 1976 and 1979 elections and really only won in 1982 because of the global recession that year which harmed Swedish heavy industry. His tenure from 1982 to 1986 was unremarkable, and actually made a number of decisions (such as the deregulation of the Swedish banking system in 1985 and the use of devaluations to paper over internal imbalances) that would lead to the early-1990s recession, which led to Carl Bildt winning in 1991 and taking a chainsaw to the Swedish welfare state, which included things like the privatization of the school system.
I always found the lionization of him to be very strange, much like Americans beatify Kennedy because he got shot. He presided over many progressive economic accomplishments in the 1969 - 1976 period, but these were not exactly the result of new ideas, but rather simply carrying the momentum of the 1960s onwards.
Erlander did far more to actually build up the Swedish Model and expand it, Palme merely put the icing on the cake.
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