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LARS OHLY

Left Party rejects shared leadership

Top brass with Sweden’s Left Party, Vänsterpartiet, has said ‘no’ to a shared party leadership on the grounds of a current well-working organization. The party’s congress must now decide who will succeed Lars Ohly.

“It is important to have a collective leadership with a large and broad party board,” Party Secretary Anki Ahlsten told the TT news agency.

“There are many positive arguments for a divided party leadership. But we’ve landed in the party’s current management structure because it is essentially working well,” she said in a press release.

According to Ahlsten, there was a clear majority at the time of vote who favoured continuing with a one leader model.

“We will continue to choose between the four candidates for congress,” said Ahlsten, who believes the board’s decision did not make harder nor easier to select a successor.

Candidates from the party include Jonas Sjöstedt, Ulla Andersson, Hans Linde and Rossana Dinamarca.

The party congress will make the ultimate decision in January and Ahlsten claims the race is too close to call.

“It will be very interesting to see. I think it’s very close right now,” she told TT.

The hotly-contested leadership position opened after current party head Lars Ohly announced his resignation on August 9th.

The idea of a split leadership, modelled after the Green Party, began to quickly gain ground in the week’s following Ohly’s announcement, despite previous opposition in both 2006 and 2010.

A poll conducted by TT news agency in September revealed that in the case of a split leadership, Sjöstedt and Andersson held a slight advantage while a single leader gave the edge to the female candidates.

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