He left office after failing to form a government after the 1976 general election, which ended 40 years of unbroken rule by the Social Democratic Party.

He was the first Western head of government to visit Cuba after its revolution, giving a speech in Santiago praising contemporary Cuban revolutionaries.

Frequently a critic of Soviet and American foreign policy, he expressed his resistance to imperialist ambitions and authoritarian regimes, including those of Francisco Franco of Spain, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, Gustáv Husák of Czechoslovakia, and most notably John Vorster and P. W. Botha of South Africa, denouncing apartheid as a "particularly gruesome system".

Palme's assassination on a Stockholm street on 28 February 1986 was the first murder of a national leader in Sweden since Gustav III in 1792, and had a great impact across Scandinavia.

On 10 June 2020, Swedish prosecutors held a press conference to announce that there was "reasonable evidence" that Stig Engström had killed Palme.

[3] The 2020 conclusion has faced widespread criticism from lawyers, police officers and journalists, decrying the evidence as only circumstantial, and – by the prosecutors' own admission – too weak to ensure a trial had the suspect been alive.

Sven Olof Joachim Palme[5] was born on 30 January 1927[6] into an upper class, conservative Lutheran family in the Östermalm district of Stockholm.

His travels in the Third World, as well as the United States, where he saw deep economic inequality and racial segregation, helped to develop these views.

[11] Inspired by radical debate in the student community, he wrote a critical essay on Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Palme wrote his senior honour thesis on the United Auto Workers union, led at the time by Walter Reuther.

After graduation, he traveled throughout the country and eventually ended up in Detroit, where his hero Reuther agreed to an interview which lasted several hours.

[21] On 21 February 1968, Palme participated in a protest in Stockholm against U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam together with the North Vietnamese ambassador to the Soviet Union, Nguyễn Thọ Chân.

[citation needed][32] During the tenure of Palme, several major reforms in the Swedish constitution were carried out, such as orchestrating a switch from bicameralism to unicameralism in 1971 and in 1975 replacing the 1809 Instrument of Government (at the time the oldest political constitution in the world after that of the United States) with a new one officially establishing parliamentary democracy rather than de jure monarchic autocracy, abolishing the Cabinet meetings chaired by the King and stripping the monarchy of all formal political powers.

[34] Under Palme's premiership tenure, matters concerned with child care centers, social security, protection of the elderly, accident safety, and housing problems received special attention.

Under Palme the public health system in Sweden became efficient, with the infant mortality rate standing at 12 per 1,000 live births.

[35] An ambitious redistributive programme was carried out, with special help provided to the disabled, immigrants, the low paid, single-parent families, and the old.

[38][page needed] As noted by Isabela Mares, during the first half of the Seventies "the level of benefits provided by every subsystem of the welfare state improved significantly."

[42] The Palme cabinet was also active in the field of education, introducing such reforms as a system of loans and benefits for students, regional universities, and preschool for all children.

[43] That same year, work-environment improvement grants were introduced and made available to modernising firms "conditional upon the presence of union-appointed 'safety stewards' to review the introduction of new technology with regard to the health and safety of workers".

[45] Palme's last government, elected during a time when Sweden's economy was in difficult shape, sought to pursue a "third way," designed to stimulate investment, production, and employment, having ruled out classical Keynesian policies as a result of the growing burden of foreign debt, together with the big balance of payments and budget deficits.

Increases were also made to both food subsidies and child allowances, while the employee investment funds (which represented a radical form of profit-sharing) were introduced.

[36][page needed] In 1968, Palme was a driving force behind the release of the documentary Dom kallar oss mods ("They Call Us Misfits").

[47][48] As a forerunner in green politics, Palme was a firm believer in nuclear power as a necessary form of energy, at least for a transitional period to curb the influence of fossil fuel.

[53] In June 1972 at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment he described the environmental damage caused by the Vietnam War (including use of Agent Orange and other rainbow herbicides to deforst whole areas of the country) as ecocide and called for it to become an international crime.

[61][62][63] GH was a long-time suspect partly because he had self-described financial motives, and owned the only registered .357 Magnum in the Stockholm vicinity not tested and ruled out by authorities, which as yet has not been recovered.

On 18 March 2020, Swedish investigators met in Pretoria with members of South African intelligence agencies to discuss the case.

[65] On 10 June 2020, Swedish prosecutors stated publicly that they knew who had killed Palme and named Stig Engström, also known as "Skandia Man", as the assassin.

Engström was one of about twenty people who had claimed to witness the assassination and was later identified as a potential suspect by Swedish writers Lars Larsson and Thomas Pettersson.