“We need a strong European Union in the world we live in today,” she told POLITICO. “With Russia still waging war in Ukraine, we have an unpredictable United States, and we have China trying to step forward — we really need the European Union to be strong.”

Sweden has an influential voice in European affairs, with an enviable economic record and numerous successful businesses, including tech successes Klarna and Spotify and manufacturing giants Volvo and Saab. If she is confirmed as prime minister, Andersson will be one of the few voices from the left among the EU’s 27 leaders, alongside Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen and the embattled Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

When it comes to beefing up the EU, Andersson’s priority is to overhaul its decision-making processes, especially at the sometimes quarrelsome European Council leaders’ summits. Andersson was in office at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and remembers the difficult dynamic during sanctions discussions, when Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán threw obstacles in the way of agreements that required unanimous support. 

The “number one” issue for giving the EU a strong voice is whether the bloc’s 27 leaders “can actually agree on things” when they sit “around the table,” she said. “Having a strong Europe — finding unanimity, how important that is for us to be strong — I think that’s the key.”

To that end, Andersson wants to scrap the rule granting a veto right to every EU member country on foreign policy. “I think it should be qualified majority … on foreign policy,” she said, adding that when Ukraine and other countries — such as candidates in the Western Balkans — join the EU, “there will be changes one way or another, and then I think this should be one of the issues discussed at that point in time.”

One area where EU leaders tried — and famously failed — to get a unanimous agreement was on whether or not to use Russia’s financial assets, lying immobilized in a Brussels depository, to help fund Ukraine’s mounting costs of defending itself. Efforts to secure a deal foundered last year on legal concerns from Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever.