# Lotta Johnsson Fornarve

# Lotta Johnsson Fornarve

Lotta Johnsson Fornarve (born Lise-Lotte Kristina Jonsson, 13 April 1956 in Hälleforsnäs) is a Swedish politician for the Left Party. She was an ordinary member of the Riksdag for Södermanland County from 29 September 2014 until 28 September 2026. From 24 September 2018 to 26 September 2022 she was the Riksdag's Second Deputy Speaker.

She became widely known through the secret ballot of 24 September 2018, when the chamber elected her Second Deputy Speaker with 149 votes to 82 for Björn Söder of the [Sweden Democrats](/organizations/sweden-democrats), while 117 members cast blank ballots. The election went to a third round because neither candidate reached the 175 votes required in the first two. Practice had been that the post went to the third-largest party, then the Sweden Democrats, but the Left Party nominated Johnsson Fornarve because it considered Söder unsuitable, and the [Swedish Social Democratic Party](/organizations/swedish-social-democratic-party) said it would vote for her. The [Green Party](/organizations/green-party) also supported her candidacy, while [the centre](/organizations/the-centre)-right Alliance parties had said they would cast blank ballots.

Before parliament she worked in the Swedish campaign against apartheid. In a 2005 interview for the Nordic Africa Institute she said she joined the board of the Isolate South Africa Committee (ISAK) near its start as a representative of the Young [Communist League](/organizations/communist-league), later organised the People's Parliament against Apartheid in 1986, and as international secretary took part in the reception of Nelson Mandela, including a concert for him at Globen in Stockholm. The biography she filed with the Riksdag lists her as ISAK's international secretary from 1976 to 1994. She trained as a leisure pedagogue at Stockholm's teacher college (Lärarhögskolan) and as a folk high school teacher, and holds a bachelor's degree in social anthropology from Linköping University. Until 2014 she taught Swedish for immigrants for the municipalities of Norrköping and Nyköping.

She was a municipal councillor in Linköping from 1998 to 2002, including on the education committee, and in Oxelösund from 2006 to 2014, chairing the culture and leisure committee from 2010 to 2014. She chaired the Left Party district in Sörmland from 2006 to 2012 and sat on the national party board from 2010 to 2016. The same biography lists her as the party's spokesperson on development aid, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and Western Sahara, and records membership of the Committee on Defence in 2017–2018 and of the Defence Commission in 2017–2019. After the 2022 election she stood for Third Deputy Speaker and, on 26 September 2022, lost a third-round ballot to [Kerstin Lundgren](/people/kerstin-lundgren) of the Centre Party, by 52 votes to 57. In November 2025 she told *Södermanlands Nyheter* that she would leave full-time politics after three terms, and she called the deputy speakership the assignment she had valued most.

## Early life and education

### Upbringing in Hälleforsnäs

Lotta Johnsson Fornarve was born on 13 April 1956 in Mellösa parish, Södermanland County. The Riksdag volume *Fakta om folkvalda*, whose biographies are information submitted by members, records her under that name and names her parents as Gun and Bertil Jonsson. Altinget gives her place of birth as Hälleforsnäs. The locality is in Mellösa parish, within Flen Municipality; the Church of Sweden parish has churches in both Mellösa and Hälleforsnäs.

In a self-presentation for SVT's 2024 European-election compass she wrote that she had grown up in a working-class family in the mill town of Hälleforsnäs, and that she was married, had an adult son and lived in Oxelösund Municipality. A profile in *Södermanlands Nyheter* likewise placed her childhood in Hälleforsnäs and her later home in Oxelösund, and reported that she became politically active at an early age, joining the youth organization of the Left Party at the end of the 1970s and later the party itself. Published accounts do not describe her parents' occupations beyond the names in the parliamentary register.

Hälleforsnäs grew up around an ironworks that long dominated local employment. A 2007 locality analysis by Flen Municipality describes an unbroken *bruk* tradition from the mid-seventeenth century: after ore was found nearby, a water-powered blast furnace was authorized at Hälleforsen, and the works, Hällefors styckebruk, began by casting iron cannon. A works village with a school, health care and workers' housing formed beside the plant; a railway station named Hälleforsnäs, opened in 1879, later tied that village to a settlement by the line. Drawing mainly on a 1992 local history, the analysis states that employment at the works peaked in the 1960s at about 1,000, fell sharply in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the integrated company went bankrupt in 1997. It links part of the later population decline to that contraction and puts the number of inhabitants at about 1,700 when the analysis was written.

### Education

The parliamentary biography lists her education without years of completion: compulsory school and municipal adult education (*kommunal vuxenutbildning*); upper-secondary school; training as a leisure-time pedagogue (*fritidspedagog*) at *Lärarhögskolan* in Stockholm; training as a folk high school teacher at Linköping University; and a *filosofie kandidatexamen* (fil.kand.) in social anthropology at the same university. The Swedish Council for Higher Education translates *kandidatexamen* as a degree of bachelor and notes that a university may add a prefix such as *filosofie*. The register does not date her anthropology degree.

Altinget summarizes the higher part of the record as a fritidspedagog qualification from Stockholm's teacher-training college and folk high school teacher training at Linköping University. In the 2024 SVT questionnaire she reported a completed university degree as her highest level of education and gave her occupation as member of the Riksdag and teacher.

A *fritidspedagog* is trained for the *fritidshem*, the leisure-time centre for school-age children. The National Agency for Education (Skolverket) states that a higher-education qualification intended for teaching or work there—among older awards, an examination on the fritidspedagog line or a *fritidspedagogexamen*—can support eligibility to teach in a fritidshem, while a gymnasium-level course cannot. Her biography names the Stockholm college but not the length or the exact award.

Linköping University describes its folk high school teacher programme, begun in 1970, as the only one in Sweden, and characterizes folk high schools as freer than ordinary schools, without national syllabuses or grades. The parliamentary entry lists the anthropology degree separately from that training and gives her title as folk high school teacher and teacher of Swedish for immigrants (SFI).

## Anti-apartheid activism

### The Isolate South Africa Committee

The Isolate South Africa Committee (Swedish: Isolera Sydafrika-kommittén, ISAK) was an umbrella in the wider movement in Sweden against apartheid, not one party's project. It was constituted in Stockholm on 15 January 1979, after preparations in the autumn of 1978 by a group started by the Africa Groups of Sweden with political and Christian youth organizations, and it began as the Isolate South Africa Campaign. Its aims were a consumer boycott, an end to Swedish investment and trade, no official sports or cultural exchange, the release of political prisoners, and support for the African National Congress and for SWAPO in Namibia. At its peak it had about 70 member organizations, described as representing some 1.5 million people, from most of Swedish society except business, the conservative party and the far right. It began with a boycott week around the anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings on 21 March and later campaigned all year. Until 1985 its elected board was called the campaign committee.

Lotta Johnsson Fornarve came in through the Young Communist League. The Nordic Africa Institute's record of her interview places her with ISAK and the Left Party. She said southern Africa was new to her. She joined the board near the start as the league's representative, while handling its international questions in Stockholm and sitting on its national board, and she also worked in the local ISAK group. Two accounts that both come from her date the paid post differently. The biography she gave the Riksdag lists her as international secretary from 1976 to 1994, which begins before the committee existed. In a 2005 interview she said she remained a board member until about 1985 or 1986, and was then employed, first on the People's Parliament against Apartheid and afterwards as international secretary.

### Campaigns and Nordic cooperation

Her first memories were of work in Stockholm: a campaign against Scandinavian Airlines flights to South Africa, street theatre in the city centre, and boycotts of shops selling South African fruit. She named the Africa Groups, a peace committee and the Young Communist League as the main local participants, with the Social Democratic youth only slightly involved. She called the Africa Groups the engine of the anti-apartheid work and the organization that had taken the initiative to build ISAK.

She said the early focus was Swedish investment and fruit imports. A 1979 law then prohibited new investments in South Africa and Namibia; the government bill is Proposition 1978/79:196. Campaigning then turned to a consumer boycott of fruit, aimed at importers, including the cooperative movement, and at shoppers and local councils. The institute's history of the archive dates a ban on South African agricultural imports to 1985 and comprehensive trade sanctions to 1987, matching a 1985/86 bill on agricultural imports and a 1986/87 bill on trade with South Africa and Namibia.

As international secretary she arranged European conferences on boycotts and kept contact with groups in Britain, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries. Nordic organizations met two or three times a year, including around meetings of foreign ministers. The SAS campaign was joint because Sweden, Norway and Denmark owned the airline. She named Norway's Fellesrådet for det sørlige Afrika and a Namibia committee, a Finnish isolate-South-Africa committee she called ELAC, and Denmark's South Africa Committee. Shared work included the Shell oil boycott, political prisoners, bank loans and demands for mandatory sanctions, together with a boycott of official culture and sport. She said the liberal youth sometimes found the ANC and SWAPO too radical, and that Shell was the main dispute inside the committee.

In 1986 ISAK and the Swedish UN Association gathered the Swedish anti-apartheid movement in a People's Parliament against Apartheid. She was on the organizing committee, having started that work at the end of 1985. On 21 February, at Folkets Hus in Stockholm, Prime Minister Olof Palme welcomed ANC and SWAPO leaders, addressed Oliver Tambo, and said that a system such as apartheid could not be reformed, only abolished. He also said that Nelson Mandela should obviously be released.

### Mandela's visit and the end of ISAK

Mandela was released in February 1990. On 12 March he arrived in Stockholm, where a crowd greeted him and his wife, Winnie Mandela, and he met Tambo for the first time in 28 years. Tambo was recovering in the city after a stroke; they had last seen each other in London in 1962. The next day he told the Riksdag it was the first time he had spoken in any parliament, and that Swedish opinion had created relations "from people to people" beyond official cooperation.

In 2013 she told *Södermanlands Nyheter* that Sweden was the first country he visited after his release, that she had worked in ISAK and a Free Nelson Mandela committee, and that as international secretary she had been responsible for the work to free him. The archive shows that work as a committee campaign, with files on several prisoner cases, including Mandela. She said she helped receive him and other released leaders, and that she and another woman gathered a group which arranged a gala at Globen as a "people's tribute". She remembered about 350 singers from different choirs performing freedom songs, and said more artists wanted to appear than the programme could take. A news photograph of Mandela raising his fist at "the Mandela concert" in Stockholm is dated 16 March 1990. The institute notes only that a gala was arranged for the visit.

In the early 1990s ISAK turned to twinning, peace monitors and observers for the 1994 elections, became ISAC – the South Africa Committee in the archive's English form, and closed in 1995. She said she stayed until the end, that less of the new contact work lasted than she had hoped, and that she was not closely involved in the successor network, Network Southern Africa. Her Riksdag entry ends the secretaryship in 1994, a year before that closure.

## Teaching and municipal politics

### Swedish for immigrants and folk high schools

Until 2014, when she took her seat in the Riksdag, Johnsson Fornarve was employed as a teacher of Swedish for immigrants (*svenska för invandrare*, sfi) by Norrköping Municipality and Nyköping Municipality. The Education Act states that this education is meant to give adult immigrants a basic knowledge of Swedish and, for those who lack them, basic reading and writing skills.

The Riksdag lists her occupation as folk high school teacher and sfi teacher. She trained as a folk high school teacher at Linköping University; the biography she supplied does not name a folk high school as an employer. Swedish folk high schools (*folkhögskolor*) are voluntary adult education outside the centrally regulated school system. Each school sets its own courses; in 2025, 110 of 152 schools were run by civil-society organisations and the rest by regions.

### Linköping and Oxelösund

She was a member of the municipal council in Linköping, in Östergötland County, from 1998 to 2002, and during the same years sat on the municipality's education committee (*utbildningsnämnden*). The municipality's statistics unit recorded 131,948 registered inhabitants on 31 December 1998 and 135,066 on 31 December 2002. Under the Local Government Act the council is the municipality's decision-making assembly. It appoints an executive board and the other committees required for municipal tasks, and it elects each committee's chair from among the committee's members. Committees decide on administration within duties set by law or delegated by the council.

From 2006 to 2014 she sat on the council in Oxelösund, a small coastal municipality in Södermanland County. Statistics Sweden recorded 11,193 inhabitants there at the end of 2010, 10,870 of them in the locality. The municipal administration names SSAB, with just over 2,000 employees at the steelworks, as the largest employer, ahead of the municipality (about 900) and the port (more than 200).

In both the 2006 and 2010 elections the Left Party held four of the council's 31 seats. After the 2010 election the [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats) had 12 and the Moderates nine. From 2010 to 2014 she chaired the culture and leisure committee. Municipal regulations assign it culture, leisure and tourism, including the public library, grants to associations and the municipal art collection. In February 2014 *Södermanlands Nyheter* reported that a revaluation of the collection — the first proper one, she said, since the 1960s — wrote its value down by 300,000 kronor because of damage and a fall in the value of 1970s works. That left the committee's 2013 accounts 109,000 kronor short, although she said ordinary operations had run a surplus.

At the council meeting on Wednesday 22 October 2014, after she had taken her Riksdag seat, she and Elisabeth Wink asked to be released from their ordinary mandates. Substitutes Jill Wipa of the Green Party and Jan Blom of the Sweden Democrats were released at the same meeting. Earlier that year the Left Party's Södermanland selection conference in Eskilstuna placed her first on the county Riksdag list, with Lotta Back of Katrineholm and Maud Ekman of Eskilstuna heading the two county-council lists.

### District leadership

The Riksdag biography dates her chairmanship of the Left Party's Södermanland district to 2006–2012. In November 2010 she told *Katrineholms-Kuriren* that she had appealed to Åke Tholin, a leading figure in the Vingåker branch, to resign his council seat. She said he had bypassed a delegation negotiating a majority with the Social Democrats and opened talks with a local group, VTL, which she called right-wing populist, stopping a red-green arrangement. Tholin demanded an apology, saying she had consulted only former branch chair Lasse Nilsson.

The party congress in Gävle on 7–9 May 2010 elected her a substitute on the national executive, the *partistyrelse*. In January 2012 a later congress made her an ordinary member. She said she would work mainly on international questions, and also on feminism, the labour market and integration. The biography dates membership of the executive to 2010–2016 and also lists her as a board member of the Oxelösund branch.

She also sat on the board of Vänsterns Internationella Forum (VIF). In 2013 *Södermanlands Nyheter* described VIF as the party's body for international solidarity work, including democracy projects largely financed by [Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency](/organizations/swedish-international-development-cooperation-agency) (Sida) grants of the kind paid to Swedish parties generally. It reported that she was responsible for a women's network inside the African Left Networking Forum and had attended a conference for it in Burkina Faso.

She was among the initiators of Ett Oxelösund för alla, formed after a culture café in December 2014 and described as politically and religiously unbound, with "positive anti-racism" as its aim. About 35 people, a majority of them foreign-born, came to the first meeting in February 2015, where the local housing shortage was discussed. The Riksdag biography lists her as chair.

## Member of the Riksdag

### Elections in Södermanland County

Lotta Johnsson Fornarve was a [Left Party](/organizations/left-party) member of the Riksdag for Södermanland County from 29 September 2014 to 28 September 2026. She was also second deputy speaker from 24 September 2018 to 26 September 2022, while remaining a serving member. The Riksdag's 349 seats consist of 310 fixed constituency seats and 39 adjustment seats, which correct the result toward proportionality between the parties. A candidate ranks ahead of the party list only with personal votes of at least 5 per cent of that party's votes in the constituency.

In 2014 the Left Party won 9,084 votes in the county, 5.09 per cent. The constituency had nine fixed seats and eleven in all, and the party's single seat was an adjustment seat. Johnsson Fornarve stood first on the list. The register of members originally returned gives the seat to a 58-year-old woman in that place who was not personally elected, and the personal-vote table gives the Left candidate elected by list order 339 votes, 3.73 per cent of the party vote.

In 2018 the party took 12,162 votes, 6.63 per cent, and the seat was a fixed constituency seat; the county returned ten members. She was again first on the list, recorded as a woman born in 1956 and not personally elected, and the candidate elected by list order received 429 personal votes, 3.53 per cent.

In 2022 the party took 9,605 votes, 5.20 per cent. Of the county's eleven seats, nine were fixed, and the Left seat was an adjustment seat, one of eight the party received nationally, assigned to Södermanland on those 9,605 votes. Johnsson Fornarve led list 0005-00077, which carried 6,013 ballot papers, and received 404 personal votes. Maria Forsberg, second on the list, received 430, and no Left candidate reached 5 per cent, so list order decided the seat. The Election Authority named Johnsson Fornarve the member, with Forsberg, Patrik Renfors and Roja Mahmoudi as substitutes.

### Committees and delegations

From 7 October 2014 she was a deputy on the Committee on Civil Affairs until 9 November 2017 and on the Committee on [Foreign Affairs](/organizations/foreign-affairs) until 24 September 2018, and from 14 October 2014 a deputy on the Committee on Education until the same date. She was a full member of the Committee on Defence from 9 November 2017 to 24 September 2018, and she sat for short periods on the composite Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, including as a deputerad from 15 May to 14 June 2018. From 1 November 2014 to 31 October 2018 she was a deputy in the Riksdag delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the [Council of Europe](/organizations/council-of-europe).

On 7 December 2017 she succeeded Stig Henriksson on the Defence Commission; the Riksdag biography dates that assignment to 2017–2019. She was a member of the committee on improved protection for total-defence activities from 1 December 2017 to 31 May 2019. The biography also lists membership of the Swedish Security Service's advisory council and of the advisory council for Police Region East in the Swedish Police Authority, without dates.

From 16 October 2018 to 26 September 2022 she was a deputy, not a full member, on defence and foreign affairs. On 18 March 2020, so that committees could still meet when few members were in Stockholm during the coronavirus pandemic, the chamber added more than 300 extra deputy places and let the parties nominate members to almost any committee and to the Committee on European Union Affairs. From that date she was a deputy on the labour-market, civil-affairs, finance, justice, culture, environment and agriculture, enterprise, social-insurance, taxation, health and welfare, transport and education committees, and on the EU committee. The constitution-committee place ended on 3 September 2020, when extra deputies left the constitution, foreign-affairs and defence committees because classified material was difficult to handle in so large a group; her earlier deputyships on the last two continued. The other March 2020 places ran to 26 September 2022, and the EU-committee place to 4 October 2022.

She chaired the Riksdag steering group for bilateral democracy cooperation from 11 February 2020 to 26 October 2022 and remained a member until 28 September 2026. She was a deputy in the Swedish delegation to the [Nordic Council](/organizations/nordic-council) from 9 October 2018, reappointed annually, and a full member from 15 October 2025 to 28 September 2026. In the 2022–2026 term she was a deputy on justice and foreign affairs from 4 October 2022 and on defence from 18 January 2023, all three until 28 September 2026, a civil-affairs deputy again from 30 April 2026, and a short-term deputy on the composite foreign-affairs and defence committee, including from 5 November to 12 December 2024.

## Second Deputy Speaker

### The 2018 vote

On 24 September 2018, at the first sitting of the Riksdag elected on 9 September, members chose a Speaker and three deputy speakers. [Andreas Norlén](/people/andreas-norlen) of the [Moderate Party](/organizations/moderate-party) became Speaker by 203 votes to 145 for [Åsa Lindestam](/people/asa-lindestam) of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, who was then elected first deputy speaker by acclamation. Practice, as Liberal group leader Christer Nylander described it, gave the deputy posts by size to the largest parties without the speakership. The Sweden Democrats, third with 62 of 349 seats and 1,135,627 votes, nominated the incumbent, [Björn Söder](/people/bjorn-soder).

The Left Party, with 28 seats, refused him. On 20 September party leader [Jonas Sjöstedt](/people/jonas-sjostedt) said the party had asked the Centre Party to stand a candidate and, refused, would nominate Lotta Johnsson Fornarve, who said no presiding officer should come from a party which in her words had a clearly racist agenda. Mia Sydow Mölleby nominated her in the chamber and demanded a secret ballot, arguing that a deputy speaker represents the whole Riksdag, not a party.

That morning Social Democratic group leader Anders Ygeman dropped a plan to abstain and said his party would vote for her. The Sweden Democrats, he said, distinguished "Swedes from Swedes", not least through Söder, and the Moderates had already left practice by taking Sweden Democrat votes for a speaker from the second-largest party. Jonas Eriksson said the Green Party would back her because Söder could not represent all of Sweden; in 2014, with no opponent, [the Greens](/organizations/the-greens) had abstained.

The Alliance of Moderates, Centre, Liberals and [Christian Democrats](/organizations/christian-democrats) instructed its members to vote blank. Tobias Billström said neither nominee was the Alliance's and called the setting aside of proportionality regrettable. Nylander called Söder's "prejudiced and crudely generalising" statements disqualifying, but said proportionality still gave the Sweden Democrats the post, so a blank paper was both a no to Söder and a vote by practice. Anders W. Jonsson said the Centre Party would not support a party he described as having "roots in Swedish Nazism", or a nominee whose statements he called racist and deeply unworthy, and would not vote for what he called the Riksdag's other fringe party. Mattias Karlsson said the others were ready to scrap proportionality and ignore more than 1.1 million Sweden Democrat voters, and that Söder had never claimed Jews cannot be Swedes.

No one had more than half the votes in the first two rounds: 147 for Johnsson Fornarve, 80 for Söder and 121 blank, then 149, 82 and 116. The third round, decided by the larger vote, was 149, 82 and 117, and the chamber elected her. The ballot was secret. In the last two rounds his 82 votes exceeded the Sweden Democrats' 62 seats by 20, and hers exceeded the 144 seats of the Social Democrats, Left Party and Greens by five.

### Tenure, 2018–2022

The Riksdag's register lists her as second deputy speaker from 24 September 2018 to 26 September 2022. Together with the speaker and the other deputy speakers she sat on the presidium, which meets regularly on how the Riksdag's work is led. A deputy speaker may chair the chamber in the speaker's place and represent the Riksdag; unlike the speaker, a deputy may vote while presiding but may not debate from the chair, and otherwise sits as an ordinary member.

In a *Dagens ETC* interview of 3 October 2018 she said she accepted Jonas Sjöstedt's offer at once, expecting an uproar, because it might be her only chance "to kick out a Sweden Democrat as deputy speaker". She said she would leave most committees and stay out of debates, while remaining a member. Sweden Democrat members, she said, had to be treated like any others; giving the party the office would, in her view, legitimise opinions she called racist. She said she was not a communist, though she had joined Vänsterpartiet Kommunisterna in the 1970s. Jimmie Åkesson described the result as letting "a communist" through.

### Debate over parliamentary practice

Karlsson said the bourgeois group leaders had praised proportionality and then seen the chamber abandon it. He nominated Söder for third deputy speaker; Söder lost to the Centre Party's Kerstin Lundgren, 272 votes to 69. Åkesson told *[Svenska Dagbladet](/organizations/svenska-dagbladet)* it was "incredibly weak, especially of the Moderates": his party had let their speaker candidate through, and they had let a communist through. Had the Alliance voted for Söder instead of abstaining, he said, Söder would have won. Henrik Gustafsson, the party's information chief, wrote that the other parties had excluded 1.1 million voters, and *Expressen* reported that several Moderates had wanted the group to back Söder.

The parties that voted for Johnsson Fornarve rested on Söder's statements. In a December 2014 *Dagens Nyheter* interview, while already second deputy speaker, he said some people in Sweden belonged to "the Sami or the Jewish nation", and distinguished citizenship from national belonging: Sami and Jews could be Swedish citizens, he said, but most people of Jewish origin who became Swedes left their Jewish identity. In June 2018, after Annie Lööf cited the interview, he wrote on the Centre Party's Facebook page that she "belittles the standing of Jews and Sami in Sweden when she indirectly claims that they are Swedes" and that they "have minority status in Sweden precisely because they are not Swedes". The Sami Parliament's speaker, Paulus Kuoljok, called the post provocative; Lööf answered that a Swedish citizen is Swedish whether or not they belong to a national minority; Söder told SVT that the criticism reversed his meaning and that he was defending minorities' separate rights. Ygeman, Eriksson and Mölleby treated that record as reason not to return him to the presidium. Nylander and Jonsson shared the objection to Söder but registered it by abstaining, not by voting for the Left Party.

Asked by *Expressen* whether this was a "kupp" (coup) against the Sweden Democrats, political scientist Jenny Madestam said it could be called that. Tommy Möller said leaving practice was not breaking a rule, though once one party did so others could follow, and that the Sweden Democrats had cause to be angry. The posts were disputed again when a new presidium was elected in September 2022.

## Foreign affairs, aid and defence

### Development cooperation and SRHR

Johnsson Fornarve has been the Left Party's spokesperson on development aid, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and Western Sahara, and a substitute on the Riksdag's Committee on Foreign Affairs. In December 2023 the government and the Sweden Democrats presented *Bistånd för en ny era* (Aid for a new era). Aid minister Johan Forssell described it as tying aid to trade and gave Ukraine and its neighbourhood priority after Russia's invasion; Sweden Democrat Aron Emilsson said Swedish interests, including leverage over deportations, would weigh more heavily.

She has treated that agenda, and the dropping of the 1 per cent of GNI aid target, as a break with needs-based assistance. In October 2024 she told Moderate minister Benjamin Dousa that the benchmark had already been replaced, in the 2023 budget bill, by a fixed sum, and that a cut to 53 billion kronor a year from 2026 risked taking Sweden under the [United Nations](/organizations/united-nations) 0.7 per cent level by 2028. She objected to 2.6 billion kronor charged for empty Migration Agency housing and to what she called a drift toward tied aid and return-related spending. Dousa replied that Sweden was still one of five donors meeting 0.7 per cent — 0.84 per cent of GNI in 2024 and 0.81 per cent in 2025 — inside frames of 56 billion kronor and then 53 billion, with in-Sweden refugee costs capped at 8 per cent.

In May 2026, after strategies for Liberia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Bolivia were closed, she said women and children were losing schools and maternal care. Support for Ukraine, she said, should be military, economic and humanitarian, but not taken from other life-sustaining aid; Sweden could borrow, as it did for military support, or forgo tax cuts at the top. Dousa answered that nearly doubling Ukraine aid had to come from reallocation.

On SRHR she argued in April 2025 that ending a feminist foreign policy had been a mistake and that aid with gender equality as its main purpose had fallen by more than 2 billion kronor between 2019 and 2024, to the lowest share in nearly 25 years. Dousa said Sweden remained a large donor to the United Nations Population Fund, with about 1 billion kronor in 2023, a further 75 million in core support in March 2025, and 112.5 million kronor in core support to UN Women that year.

### Western Sahara and other international files

In November 2019, as second deputy speaker, she returned from three of five large Sahrawi camps in western Algeria, first visited in 1981 when they were mostly tents. *Södermanlands Nyheter* cited a UN figure of more than 170,000 people in settlements that had come to resemble towns.

She travelled with Social Democrats, other Left MPs, Emmaus and the Swedish Western Sahara Committee, and said Morocco had occupied the territory since 1975 and that the International Court of Justice had assigned it to the Sahrawis. The Sahrawi president, she said, thanked Sweden for a 2012 Riksdag instruction, on motions from the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party, to recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and press the EU — still not carried out.

On 2 November 2022 she asked the Nordic Council to press for the promised referendum and to keep Nordic firms off occupied land without consent from the Polisario Front. The presidium recommended no further action. In October 2024 she sought emergency aid after ration cuts of 30 per cent by the World Food Programme and 20 per cent by the UN refugee agency, and after floods. Dousa cited core funding and 10 million kronor through Sida; she said that was not enough.

On 19 January 2026 Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told Morocco that, under Security Council resolution 2797, Sweden supported Morocco's autonomy plan as a basis for talks consistent with Sahrawi self-determination. Johnsson Fornarve called this a reversal in favour of the occupying power. Malmer Stenergard replied that the October 2025 resolution had opened a settlement, that Sweden's legal position stood, and that Sweden backed UN envoy [Staffan de Mistura](/people/staffan-de-mistura).

### Defence policy

She was a member of the Committee on Defence from 9 November 2017 to 24 September 2018, later a substitute, and a member of the Defence Commission in 2017–2019.

After the commission's report *Värnkraft*, she wrote that the Left Party accepted a stronger total defence, especially civil defence, three and a half brigades and reinforced conscription, as the price of credible non-alignment. It rejected the view that an armed attack could not be excluded, which she said went beyond earlier assessments, including from the [Stockholm International Peace Research Institute](/organizations/stockholm-international-peace-research-institute), and inflated the threat. A closer tie to NATO was unwise, she argued, and the party refused an extra 84 billion kronor for the military. In March 2018 she had urged scrapping the NATO host-nation agreement, leaving PESCO and ratifying the UN nuclear-ban treaty, crediting non-alignment for two centuries without war.

When the Riksdag sent Ukraine helmets, vests, rations, 5,000 Robot 86 anti-tank weapons and 500 million kronor, the Left Party opposed only the weapons. She abstained with five other Left MPs and told *Södermanlands Nyheter* that she did not really share that view.

On 22 March 2023 she opposed joining what she called a nuclear-weapon alliance, while condemning Russia's invasion. The chamber adopted membership the same day by 269 votes to 37; the minority was a reservation from the Left Party and the Green Party, and the roll records her vote as no.

## The 2022 presidium election

### Competing claims to the deputy speakerships

On 26 September 2022, at its first sitting after the general election of 11 September, the Riksdag chose a Speaker and three deputy speakers for the term through 2026. Andreas Norlén of the Moderate Party was re-elected Speaker by acclamation, and Kenneth G. Forslund of the Swedish Social Democratic Party was elected First Deputy Speaker the same way.

The other two places were contested. For Second Deputy Speaker, the Sweden Democrats, the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals nominated Julia Kronlid. Moderate, Christian Democrat and Liberal speakers said deputy speakers had, until 2018, been chosen according to parties' size in the chamber. The Green Party nominated Janine Alm Ericson rather than leave a Sweden Democrat place unopposed. The Left Party backed her after the Centre Party declined to field its own candidate against Kronlid. Centre leader Annie Lööf said her group accepted that seats should shape the presidium but would vote blank, as in 2018. The Social Democrats later said that they had abstained as well.

The third deputy speakership was claimed by both the Left Party and the Centre Party. In the Election Authority's final count each had 24 of 349 seats: the Left Party 437,050 votes (6.75 percent) and the Centre Party 434,945 (6.71 percent). Reporting at the time described a custom that the four presidium places went to the four largest parties, which a tie in seats did not settle by itself. Left group leader Samuel Gonzalez Westling nominated Lotta Johnsson Fornarve, Second Deputy Speaker since 2018, and argued that equal seat totals were ranked by votes. Lööf nominated the incumbent, Kerstin Lundgren, and said the chamber should decide. The Greens said both had served well and that they would vote for Fornarve on the vote totals. Social Democrat group leader Gunilla Carlsson said her party would abstain, and that without an agreement the place should be settled by lot.

### The ballot and reactions

The Riksdag Act then in force elected, in a contested secret ballot, the candidate with more than half the votes cast; failing that, another ballot was held, and a third was won by whoever received the most votes. The chamber used that sequence for the deputy speakerships. For Second Deputy Speaker, Kronlid received 173 votes to Alm Ericson's 49, with 126 blank, among 348 valid votes. On the second ballot Kronlid received 174, Alm Ericson 47 and 126 were blank, among 347 valid votes. That was more than half, and Kronlid was elected.

Neither nominee for Third Deputy Speaker reached a majority in two rounds. In the first, of 346 valid votes, Fornarve received 46, Lundgren 37 and the unnominated Centre member Martin Ådahl 3, with 260 blank. In the second, of 344 valid votes, Fornarve received 46, Lundgren 39 and Ådahl 10, with one vote each for the unnominated [Ali Esbati](/people/ali-esbati) and Björn Söder and 247 blank. In the third a plurality sufficed: of 346 valid votes Lundgren received 57, Fornarve 52, Ådahl 4 and Söder 1, with 232 blank. The chamber elected Lundgren, whose total was well above the Centre Party's 24 seats.

The ballots were secret. The next day [Sveriges Radio](/organizations/sveriges-radio)'s Ekot reported that several Sweden Democrat members said they had voted for Lundgren, against an intention to abstain, because the Left Party had tried that year, and in 2018 by running Fornarve against Björn Söder, to keep the Sweden Democrats off the presidium. One told Ekot, "Det är payback nu" ("It is payback now"). Party secretary [Richard Jomshof](/people/richard-jomshof) said he had voted blank and that abstention had been the plan. Ekot also reported votes for non-candidates, mostly Ådahl; Liberal member Fredrik Malm called that out of place, and Centre group leader Daniel Bäckström said he would raise it with the other group leaders. In SVT's later series *Maktspelet*, Left leader [Nooshi Dadgostar](/people/nooshi-dadgostar) accused the Social Democrats of having arranged the result with the Centre Party — which the Social Democrats had not confirmed — and was reported as saying "Nu är det krig" ("Now it is war").

## Final term and departure

### Parliamentary work, 2022–2026

Lotta Johnsson Fornarve's term as second deputy speaker ended on 26 September 2022. She remained an ordinary member of the Riksdag for the Left Party and Södermanland County throughout the 2022–2026 electoral term. The Riksdag records that ordinary membership as one continuous mandate, from 29 September 2014 to 28 September 2026. In the final term she was a deputy member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and of the Committee on Justice from 4 October 2022, and of the Committee on Defence from 18 January 2023. She also stayed on the Riksdag's steering group for bilateral democracy-promotion cooperation, but from 27 October 2022 as a member rather than chair, a post she had held from 11 February 2020 until 26 October 2022.

Her late questions remained with aid and foreign policy. In May 2026 she interpellated Benjamin Dousa, minister for international development cooperation and foreign trade, on the consequences for children of cuts in Swedish aid and on the effects of discontinued aid strategies; both interpellations were answered in the chamber on 29 May. On 22 June she asked Foreign Minister [Maria Malmer Stenergard](/people/maria-malmer-stenergard) about Swedish support for Taiwan in the light of Chinese military pressure, and on 9 July about Hussam Abu Safiya, a physician from the Gaza Strip whom the question described as detained after an Israeli raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital on 27 December 2024. Malmer Stenergard replied on 7 July and 23 July.

On 15 October 2025 the chamber elected her one of the ordinary members of the Swedish delegation to the Nordic Council, to sit until a new election at the start of the next Riksdag session. She had been a deputy member of that delegation since 9 October 2018, and the Riksdag's assignment list closes the ordinary place on 28 September 2026. In the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament) election of 9 June 2024 she stood 26th on the Left Party list. The party won two of Sweden's 21 seats; with 79 personal votes she was not elected.

### Retirement from full-time politics

On 11 November 2025 *Södermanlands Nyheter* reported that she would leave full-time politics. She told the paper that she had sat three electoral terms and that, with age, she could retire from full-time politics, and that leaving after twelve years was enough. She called the deputy speakership the assignment she had appreciated most, saying that it had drawn a great deal of attention and that it had been an exciting time in which a lot happened. The article, by Peter Alexis, described the autumn of 2018 as politically turbulent and wrote that she was "kuppades in" onto the speakership, a rebuff in particular to the Sweden Democrats and their candidate Björn Söder. That verb is the newspaper's, not a quotation from her.

She served out the mandate. At the summer closing in the chamber on 17 June 2026, Speaker Andreas Norlén thanked members who were not standing for a further term or who had left during the year. She was one of 32 who received the Riksdag's medal of the twelfth size, given after at least twelve years' service. Norlén addressed her last. He recalled their cooperation in the presidium while she was second deputy speaker, contributions he described as important to the Riksdag's gender-equality work, her membership for Södermanland and the Left Party since 2014, time on the defence committee, and the chairmanship of the democracy-cooperation steering group.

The ceremony was not the end of the seat. Norlén said interpellation debates would continue for several further days and that the Riksdag would meet again in August for debates and decisions. The Riksdag elected on 13 September 2026 assembled on 28 September for the roll call and the election of a new presidium, and that is the date the Riksdag gives as the close of her ordinary membership.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/lotta-johnsson-fornarve