Leader of the Swedish Social Democrats resign... again.

[Gustaf]

One of the key problems with Juholt was that the man lied in a bizarre fashion and generally behaved very weirdly.

When the civil war broke out in Libya he immediately called for Sweden to intervene (while the government initially seemed reluctant). Then the government quickly realized that they should intervene and sent some fighters to take part. Juholt appeared to have been pissed off at not being sufficiently included in this discussion, so he suddenly announced that he would demand the fighters to be withdrawn (the government does not have an own majority in parliament so they needed support from the SAP). He used the phrase "it is now time to leave this responsibility to someone else" (yes, literally, without further specification).

This caused an uproar among established foreign policy people within the SAP, since it ran contrary to the Swedish tradition under SAP governments of participating loyally in these types of missions. After a lot of heavy criticism, Juholt therefore announced, in a face-saving attempt that we should send ships to aid the Libyan rebels. This was criticized since no ships were actually needed (whereas the fighters were).

What made the incident even stranger was that Juholt then not only claimed to have been consistent on the issue, but furthermore claimed to have been the only one to have been consistent on it.

He also claimed to have smuggled a printing press to the dissidents in Poland in the 80s, which turned out to be a lie.

He said that the majority of Swedish citizens have never experienced anything other than an M-led government, which is...odd, since they've only been in power since 2006.

He also claimed that his contact ad on the internet had received 800 replies which then turned out to be a lie.

After they finally sent him on a weeklong vacation in Mexico, he came back like a week ago to start over. He did so on defence policy, his supposed area of expertise. By saying that the defence policy instituted by the government was pushed through with support from the xenophobic Sweden Democrats, which was horribly done by them. It was then pointed out that the SD wasn't actually in parliament when the policy was voted on (it happened in 2005).

So, yeah...

[Gustaf]

It should also be noted that Juholt himself, hilariously, explained just before he became leader that he wouldn't be party leader because he was too rash, disorganized and gaffe-prone to handle it (or words to that effect).

That quote was recycled quite a bit once the scandals started coming...

Anyway, they seem to be going for Löven now. Which is an improvement. Not an actual politician, but a trade unionist. Seems centrist and sensible. He's supposedly interim until 2013 but they can't really change leaders that late in the game anyway, can they?