What’s happened? 

The Green Party’s election committee has recommended that the party elect Amanda Lind, 43, as its new co-leader. 

The party officially calls its leaders “spokespersons”, or språkrör, and always has one man and one woman to ensure a gender-equal leadership. 

Lind, former culture minister and former party secretary, beat the party’s finance spokesperson, Janine Alm Ericson, and the party’s parliamentary group leader, Annika Hirvonen, to win the committee’s backing.

In a press release announcing its decision, the committee praised Lind’s “ability to communicate a vision and at the same time connect that to current political issues”, adding that her “particular experience in cultural issues” meant that she “fitted extremely well” with the party’s other leader Daniel Helldén who is more focused on issues like carbon emissions, energy, transport, and the green industrial transformation. 

So is she the leader yet? 

No. Although she has the backing of the party’s selection committee, Lind still needs to win the vote at a special additional party congress on April 28th, where 265 representatives of the party’s local districts have their say.

One of her two rivals, Hirvonen, has announced that she will not stand, but her other rival, Alm Ericson, is still in the race and got the public backing of a long list of top Green Party politicians, as well as the party’s youth group in a public opinion piece in Aftonbladet on Saturday.

“Amanda is a good candidate but I also have broad support in the party, not least from Green Youth. That means a lot. That’s why I’ve decided to continue putting forward my candidacy,” Janine Alm Ericson told SvD in an email.

Who is Amanda Lind? 

Don’t go on the dreadlocks alone.

Lind is seen within the party as a formidable organiser, who served as Sweden’s culture minister between January 2019 until the Green Party left the government in November 2021, and was party secretary between 2016 and 2019.

As a minister, she played a key role in bringing in and then lifting Covid-19 restrictions on theatre performances and sports grounds, standing firm and defending her position, despite calls for her resignation from the novelist and comedian Jonas Gardell and others. 

She also attended the award of a prize to Gui Minhai, the imprisoned Chinese writer, pushing China’s ambassador to Sweden to threaten to ban her from entering his country. 

In her private life, she is more a nerd than a rastafarian reggae obsessive, enjoying live action role-playing (LARPing) and at some point learning Esperanto, an invented language designed to facilitate global communication. In 2019, she gave a video address to the World Esperanto Congress in quite fluent sounding Esperanto. 

She grew up in Luleå in the far north of Sweden, meaning she is a good balance with Helldén, who comes from Lidingö, an upmarket suburb of Stockholm. 

What does her recommendation mean for the Green Party? 

Taken together with the ponytail sported by her male counterpart, it shows the party doubling down on non-conventional hairstyle choices. 

More seriously, when it comes to the issues of policy and strategy, it pushes back slightly against Helldén and his purported preference for a party more focused on narrow environmental issues, such as climate, energy, and biodiversity.

Lind is seen as more focused on social and cultural issues, like the rights of Sami people and immigration, even though in her campaign to win the backing of party members, she emphasised her wish to attack the government’s failings when it comes to climate policy, and said that the Green Party needs to focus on pushing for a “social just green transition”, which does not punish people living in the countryside or on lower incomes.  

Alm Ericson is seen as more closely aligned to Helldén’s more technology-focused approach, even though she, in much the same way as Lind, has emphasised her engagement in social issues in her campaign for the support of party members.