STEFAN LÖFVEN

Stefan Löfven has been the prime minister of Sweden since 2014. He was previously a welder, a trade union representative, the chairman of the union IF Metall, and he is the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

His father left before he was born, and his mother, unable to raise him but unwilling to give him up, placed him in foster care when he was ten months old but would not allow him to be adopted. He was raised in the far reaches of Sweden by a lumberjack and a health care visitor.

When I was in Stockholm in 2013 to launch the RFK Human Rights education program, Speak Truth to Power, Stefan Löfven and I had a wide-ranging discussion about labor rights worldwide and U.S.- Swedish relations. Since then we have kept in contact.

Stefan Löfven: When Robert Kennedy died I was eleven years old. Even if I couldn’t fully grasp it then, I remember being sad at the time. Later in life I came to understand the significance of his life and he has been an inspiration to me. I especially appreciate his views on the responsibility of having power, how you use power, and how you develop “good power.” I share his belief that politicians should not live off the public, but for the public. Your task, as a political leader is to accomplish things for the people, not for yourself.

Robert Kennedy kept his eyes fixed on the future. I think we can learn from that in our times, as we fight populist movements and extremists around the world. These movements try to attract people with simple messages and by appealing to people’s fears. Robert Kennedy described it very well when he said, “There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.” He returns several times to this idea: What can we do for the future? We have to do something; we cannot just go along. We have to do something and also remember that the past wasn’t that good. It is easy for people to talk about the past because it gives people a feeling of security. But that security is fragile. Instead, we need to focus on how to make things better in the future. In the Social Democratic Party in Sweden we want to address how people can feel more hope. I believe that this can only be done by showing that there is a path forward together. The key message is that we can shape the future collectively, and to show people they’re not alone. We can do this together. Your father has been an important inspiration for me in this approach.

These are not just domestic issues. We need to solve them at the international level. Take for example a German businessman whom I met. He had moved his businesses from Germany to Hungary to the Czech Republic and finally to North Africa. He told me, “It’s getting more expensive every time, because wages are going up. So now I’m thinking of moving to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.” Globalization should not be exploited to become a race to the lowest wages. Rather, we must make sure there are decent working conditions and decent wages for everyone.

Robert Kennedy talked about the world community. He recognized something I also found as a trade unionist: Talking to people around the world, you notice the similarities much more than the differences. Workers in Latin America or Asia are to a large extent concerned about the same matters as workers in Sweden: they want their children to have a good education; they need a job, they need somewhere to live, they need social protection. They will ask: “What happens if I get sick or lose my job? What will happen to my parents when they grow old? If they get sick, will they get the health care they need?” These concerns are similar all around the world. By this insight, I concluded that we must work to improve things not only in Sweden, but also internationally.

Workers everywhere feel disconnected today; some even distrust democracy. When people are unemployed for a long time, or when real wages haven’t increased for many years, people start feeling left behind, and start to lose hope and fear falling further and further behind. And then, it is easy to become attracted by a simple message: “Here’s a solution.” In Sweden, the extremists say: “If only all those refugees weren’t here, everything would be fine.” Our task must be to show the real solution: a government investing in housing, in training, in health care, and in schools for the children. We need to show that if we do this together, we can shape a better future.

Kerry Kennedy: In the United States, people feel they’ve been struggling and the immigrants have jumped the line. They were told that if you go to school, work hard in a terrible factory or mine under backbreaking conditions, you’ll be able to own a home, give your children a good education; your parents will be taken care of; you’ll have a secure retirement; and your children will have a better life than yours. But the factory moved away, the home mortgage is underwater, the schools didn’t teach their now unemployable children, their parents didn’t save enough for retirement, and, too often, their communities are suffering from opiod addiction. The system they bought into isn’t working. The elites get tax breaks and grow richer, they are frustrated and angry, and immigrants make a convenient target. They’ve decided what they’re going to do is put somebody in charge who will blow up the whole system. Voilà, Donald Trump.

SL: There are many similarities to the debate in Sweden and I think that it is hard to reach out to people who have developed such mistrust. But the solution is to be clear that we share their concerns and that we will tackle the problems. For example, we must take a tougher stance on crime. A good society cannot include gangs that threaten whole parts of cities. We need to build a safe society. As regards immigration and the refugee situation, European regulations and multilateral work must improve. We need to protect the right to seek asylum and more equally share the responsibility of receiving refugees. But we must also make it possible for immigrants to work and have high expectations on them to become a part of their new countries. They should have language training and education so that they can contribute in the labor market and not compete with lower wages and bad working conditions. At the same time, we need to invest in housing, education, and health care for everyone, so that people who already live in the country and have a tough situation don’t feel threatened. When we accomplish this, immigration can be an asset to a country.

We’ve shown that it’s possible. Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some 1.2 million people left Sweden, most of them for the United States, because we were so poor. Today we’re one of the richest nations on earth. We still have our problems, but we have one of the fairest distributions of wealth, and where there are gaps we’re working on closing those gaps. The labor movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s were able to change the direction of the country. We’ve done it once, we know we can do it again.

To find ways to constantly improve people’s lives, that is what politics and trade union work is all about for me. When I started as a welder, I went to my first workplace, and I saw there were no chairs or tables to sit and have your coffee or sandwiches. We sat against a wall on little wooden boxes. I said, “This is 1981. We can’t sit here. We have to have chairs and tables.” I got the answer that there were no chairs and tables, but I insisted and we got that changed. All of a sudden we were sitting like decent people, like we should. That triggered my engagement in trade union activities.

I think part of my interest in trade union work and politics came from my childhood. My foster parents were workers; they were not very active in the trade union, but my father was involved in getting buildings built where people in the labor movement could hold their meetings, and my mother was active in the women’s social democratic movement. We didn’t discuss politics much at home, but I learned by what they did and how they did it. I often listened when my best friend’s father, who was an active social democrat, had conversations with my father. They were so concrete, and they discussed politics in a very local, practical way: “What can we do to improve that road or that school?” That inspired me and awoke my interest.

There were so many moments in my early days, sitting in a group at the job, or in a meeting, or at a conference, when I was thinking “I’m not going to say anything,” but I could never stick to that. When I felt something was important I had to speak up. But I have tried to make sure to always search for the pragmatic solutions.

As a local trade union, we had our differences and disputes with the company. But we saw that if we were pragmatic we could make changes happen. You can’t just shout about everything; you have to show that you’re interested in reaching a compromise so that everyone benefits.

I discovered over the years that the best way to get people to come along is if you trust them, if you engage them. When we were manufacturing trains and I was the local trade union leader, the company told us, “There’s another company competing with us, so we need to improve. We need to be more efficient.” We were thirty-five workers manufacturing this train, and I went to everybody, saying, “How can we do this more efficiently?” The workers themselves came up with the ideas. In the end, we could do the job with two-thirds of the workers, and with fewer people on the project we were able to keep the train manufacturing in the company. This was possible because the workers didn’t feel threatened. They knew then that there was another part of the company that needed workers. Those who didn’t stay on making trains got other jobs.” What this taught me is that if workers feel secure they will accept the changes that are necessary and contribute to innovation and development. People need to know that if you are temporarily out of a job there will be help for you to find a new job, you will be able to get the skills and training you need, and you will be able to handle it financially for yourself and your family. Without that security, people will not accept changes and we would never have innovation.

Thinking change—and how we adjust to change—makes me wonder about the change that took place in your father after President Kennedy was killed. Is that something you can help me understand better?

KK: I’ll be happy to try.

I don’t think he changed significantly in who he was or in his values, but he approached things from a different point of view. When Martin Luther King died, Daddy quoted Aeschylus: “Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” You could sum up the first phase of his life in the phrase: tame the savageness. He spent a lot of his life standing up to bullies. He did that in high school; he did that in college; he did that in law school. He did it when he was working for the McClellan committee, which was investigating criminal activities in labor-management relations, mainly corruption in unions. He did it when he worked for McCarthy, too, because during that four-month period when he was actually on the job there he spent every day fighting against Roy Cohn and the other people who worked for McCarthy who my father thought were unfairly going after certain people accused of being Communists. When he went after the union leader Jimmy Hoffa, it was on behalf of the rank-and-file union members who were being bullied and robbed by organized crime. During the civil rights movement, of course, he was fighting for activists and all black people against the white supremacists, the segregationists, and the Jim Crow system of the South. That was the attitude, the action plan, of the first part of his life. The other part of his life, the part that seemed predominant after Uncle Jack died and my father left the executive branch, is expressed by “make gentle the life of this world.” That second part, which some people saw as a change, had always been part of him, but not so much on the public stage. That meant compassion and love, and also fun, joy, and laughter. He had a different role after Uncle Jack died, when he faced death, violence, poverty, hatred; it was a time not so much about winning a fight or a court case but more about understanding, compassion, and love.

The way my father changed was not the way many people think he did. He didn’t change from conservative to liberal or from tough and ruthless to compassionate and socially conscious. Part of it is that when he changed jobs, his perspective changed. He had to be tough as a prosecutor and as a campaign organizer. After his brother died, he went through a long period of mourning, and then he became a US senator, and in that position he was able to act out of his compassion for poor people, for people who were oppressed, for people who were bullied, for people who were persecuted, segregated, disrespected. He did a tremendous amount of work on hunger issues in the United States, on people living in poverty in urban areas, like the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, or the black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City. He aligned himself with the farmworkers who were being organized by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and he advocated for the Indians who lived on reservations in desperate poverty.

When my father was liberated from the burden of working on behalf of someone else and from the responsibility of prosecuting criminals who were fighting back with the best legal talent, and from fighting against state and local governments that had been repressing black people for hundreds of years, he took the side of the victims who had suffered at the hands of those he’d been prosecuting. I think it’s true too that when President Kennedy was killed, he found a new perspective on life and death. He thought: “I’m just going to say what I want and go where I want and do what I want.” This was a frustrating attitude for a lot of his aides, who kept saying, “You can’t go into a white neighborhood and start talking about compassion for people who aren’t white. That’s not going to fly.” Or, “You can’t work on civil rights and then go try to get farmers to vote for you. They’ll hate you.” But my father had the same message for everyone, which is, “What’s going on with your life? You’re a farmer, what are you struggling with? You’re somebody we need to help. Let’s all work together.” He hadn’t changed very much, but his role had changed, and when your role changes, the way you act changes, because then you have a different job to do, a different purpose. I think that really is an important part of the answer to how he approached things differently late in his life.

SL: I remember the speech your father gave at the Democratic Convention in 1964—he received a ten- or fifteen-minute standing ovation. He had been through so much over those years. It took time for him, not to get over it, but to handle it.

KK: It took him a long time. He read Camus and the Ancient Greeks. He thought, he took long walks. Once he became engaged in communities, working on antipoverty issues, he started to feel fully alive. He hated the routine work of the Senate, but when he was out in the field, when he was in the Mississippi delta, when he was in Appalachia, when he was working on bringing jobs and innovation to the inner cities, he felt more in touch with people and more grounded. By the time of the ’68 campaign, he had found his true voice.

A lot of people run for office because they’re simply ambitious, or the idea of higher office excites them, or they feel that “this is my career” and they must take the next step. My father didn’t approach the presidency like that at all. He felt a responsibility for Vietnam. He felt our country was going in the wrong direction. It had nothing to do with personal ambition or ego or glory. He ran out of a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility, and a sense that he could play a role in righting what was going wrong in our country and in the world. He thought he had to do it.

SL: I recognize that very much. I often refer to one thing your father has said: “We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.” You do the right thing because it is the right thing. It takes a lot of confidence to say that politically.

Self-confidence is very important if you want to lead. During my trade union time, we had a difference with a company on the pay rate system—without explaining the details, it meant I had to push the workers to accept an agreement they didn’t like. It was a very tough time and I had to face a lot of criticism. But I found out quickly that the best way to do it was to be straightforward and meet with people face-to-face. There is a feeling when you are sure you are doing the right thing, you feel it inside, in your heart, and you stand by that position. This confidence takes time to develop, but you need to have this kind of strength if you want to bring people together and do good things.

For me it has been very important as prime minister to keep on meeting with people face-to-face, especially on the most difficult issues. The best part of my work is really the conversations with people that are not in the spotlight of the political debate, about everyday life, the problems we face, how to solve them and how our society should develop. I try to do that as much as possible.

Your father once said that “or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

How we treat each other is the most basic thing. Each of us has a responsibility to try to understand the other person. That is something that is guiding me in my work, and something in which your father has been an inspiration to me.