Many (most?) non-Scandinavians seem to assume that a supposedly equal and democratic country like Sweden must be a republic, so I guess the first point I should make is that Sweden does, in fact, have a royal family. The country has been a monarchy for over 1,000 years and its official name is Kungariket Sverige (or The Kingdom of Sweden in English). Like the United Kingdom, Sweden is a constitutional monarchy in which the King is the Head of State without powers and has only ceremonial functions: power rests with the Head of Government, the Statsminister (Prime Minister).
It always amuses me when I read or hear anti-monarchists or would-be republicans in the UK arguing that no successful modern democratic state can have an unelected president. My answer is, apart from the UK itself and other Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, what is undemocratic about Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium? Without forgetting Spain: not so long ago the monarchy was reintroduced as the best guarantee that the country would remain a democracy after many decades under the fascist dictatorship. Some say that Greece and several Balkan countries could benefit from doing the same. And I am sure that Japan and Malaysia are also considered modern and successful. All these countries are monarchies!
The other argument these people use is cost. However, in the United Kingdom, official expenses related to the Queen’s duties as Head of State and Head of the Commonwealth are met from public funds in exchange for the Queen turning over revenue from the Crown Estate to the Government. In the fiscal year to 31 March 2005, the Crown Estate’s surplus revenue paid to the Treasury was £184.8m, while the Head of State’s expenditure for 2005-06 was just £37.4m. million pounds sterling. And a coronation every 50 years is much cheaper than elections every five years.
One problem with becoming a republic (assuming you keep the current model of the Prime Minister as Head of Government and only a ceremonial role for the President) is, who do you want as your president? The highly divisive choice of a former politician (Maggie Thatcher or Tony Blair, anyone?). Or a ‘popular celebrity’? How about President Beckham? Otherwise, you get an incontrovertible choice that no one knows about, at least outside of your own country. Nope? Well, then, name the president of Germany. (If she said Angela Merkel, she just proved my point.)
OK, back to Sweden and its current royal family, the House of Bernadotte. What, I hear you say, are they really called Bernadotte and not Svensson? Yes, for historical reasons, they are. The current King of Sweden is Carl XVI Gustaf, who was born in 1946 and has ruled since 1973 and is the seventh king of the Bernadotte dynasty. In 1976 he married his queen, Sylvia, who is an exotic half-German, half-Brazilian whom he met while attending the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. He was the first reigning Swedish king to marry in over 200 years, but it was important that he wait until after his coronation to marry because Sylvia was a commoner and, according to Swedish constitutional law at the time, would have had to give up the throne. He succeeded his grandfather, King Gustav VI Adolf, who was an Anglophile with strong connections to the English court. He married not one, but two English princesses. The first was Princess Margaret of Connaught, daughter of Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s third son, who sadly passed away at the age of forty. The second was Lady Louise Mountbatten, former Princess Louise of Battenberg. She was the sister of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the aunt of the Duke of Edinburgh. Lady Louise later became Queen of Sweden.
I lived in Sweden during the 1970s and I remember that King Gustav VI Adolf was a very popular and respected monarch, with a great knowledge and recognized interest in archeology and botany. His five children (all by Princess Margaret) made the issue of succession much more complicated. The eldest and heir to the throne, also named Gustaf Adolf, died in January 1947 when his DC-3, on a scheduled KLM flight from the Netherlands, crashed on takeoff at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport, killing all on board. . He was the father of the current king, who was 1 year old at the time.
The second and fifth sons, both boys, disqualified themselves by marrying commoners. The third child was a girl, Ingrid, who married the Crown Prince of Denmark and was the mother of the current Queen of Denmark, Margaretha II. Only the fourth son, Bertil, protected his interests by not marrying his bride, a Swansea commoner named Lilian Davies; they just lived together in silence. If Gustaf VI Adolf had died earlier, Bertil would have been regent for the infant king, or king himself if the child had died. However, when the current king came of age, Bertil and Lilian were married. Princess Lilian is still alive and a member of the Swedish royal family.
In some circles in Sweden, in the mid-1960s, there was something like a republican movement, although there was no question of doing anything while the old king was still alive. However, I seem to recall that there was an attempt to take advantage of the fact that his successor was still a teenager. The suggestion was that the minimum age for accession to the throne should be raised from 21 to 25, with the expectation that the aging king would die before his grandson turned 25. The aging king worked out this by living to 91, when the the new king was 27 years old. Furthermore, the young crown prince was not very popular and it was believed that he was not too bright. It was known that he had misspelled his own name and there were rumors of falsifying school exam results to allow him to graduate. Only in the 1990s was it confirmed that he suffered from dyslexia.
His marriage to Queen Silvia, who quickly learned Swedish and settled in the country, confirmed the monarchy’s position in the country, although a new constitution removed the king’s last powers. The royal couple have three children, and the law was changed in 1980 to allow the firstborn, regardless of gender, to succeed to the throne. The heir to the Swedish throne is now Crown Princess Victoria, who was born in 1977 and named after her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Ah yes, Bernardotte. Well, to make a long (rather) short story short, in 1809 Sweden lost Finland, which had made up the eastern half of the kingdom. Resentment towards King Gustavo IV Adolfo resulted in a coup that replaced him with his uncle, the boy Carlos XIII. At the time, Emperor Napoleon ruled much of continental Europe through a network of client kingdoms headed by his brothers. Therefore, the Swedish parliament decided to achieve a practical long-term solution by choosing a king who would be acceptable to Napoleon. In 1810 they chose Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s marshals, as heir apparent. It probably helped that Bernadotte was married to Désirée Clary and therefore the brother-in-law of Joseph, Napoleon’s older brother.
As crown prince of Sweden, Bernadotte assumed the name Carl Johan and officially acted as regent for the remainder of Charles XIII’s reign. He also secured a forced union between Sweden and Norway in 1814. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte reigned as King Carl XIV of Sweden and Carl III Johan of Norway from 1818 until his death in 1844. It should be noted that he took over his new responsibilities. like king. seriously, favoring Swedish interests over those of his native France.