Анна Мальмстрём: политический путь и карьера в ЕС

Swedish politician

Anna Cecilia Malmström (born 15 May 1968) is a Swedish politician who served as European Commissioner for Trade from 2014 to 2019. She previously served as European Commissioner for Home Affairs from 2010 to 2014 and Minister for European Union Affairs from 2006 to 2010. She was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Sweden from 1999 to 2006. She was a member of the Swedish Liberals, part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe until 2023.

Malmström was born in Brännkyrka parish in southern Stockholm and grew up in Gothenburg. She was a student at the University of Gothenburg from 1992 to 1999, becoming a research assistant (1994). She then gained a PhD in political science with a thesis titled The Region, the Power and the Glory: Regional Parties in Western Europe (1998), and became a senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg (1998–99). Her thesis was on regional parties in western Europe, focusing on Catalonia, Spain and Lombardy, Italy. She has researched and taught in the fields of European politics, regionalism, immigration and terrorism. Malmström has also worked in Stuttgart and in Barcelona. She is fluent in Swedish, English, Spanish and French, and has intermediate skills in German and Italian.

Malmström has been a member of the Swedish Liberals party since the late 1980s, sitting on the party executive since 1997, and was a member of the Västra Götaland Regional Council from 1998 to 2001. In 2007, when Jan Björklund was elected party leader, she was appointed first vice party chairman.

In 1999, Malmström was elected as an MEP for Sweden and she was re elected again in 2004. During her tenure she served on the Committees on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and also on the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Subcommittee on Security and Defence. In addition, she served as vice chair of the parliament's delegations to Hungary (before it joined in 2004) and Croatia. As a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Malmström wrote a critical report on the EU's Russia strategy. In 2002 she became the Liberal group's spokeswoman on foreign affairs. which aims to make Brussels the permanent seat of the European Parliament. It was the first such petition to gain one million signatures, a nod to the right of petition under the Treaty of Lisbon. In 2001, Malmström and nine fellow MEPs – including Nick Clegg and Helle Thorning Schmidt – founded the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform (CPR) to press for changes to the way the European Parliament functions on a day to day basis. She has also campaigned for greater public access to official documents.

Following the 2006 Swedish elections which saw the victory of the centre right coalition of Fredrik Reinfeldt, Malmström returned to Sweden to take up the job of Minister for European Affairs in Prime Minister Reinfeldt's cabinet, which took office on 6 October 2006. Her responsibilities included institutional issues, review of the EU budget, Baltic Sea Strategy, the Lisbon Strategy and coordinating the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2009. Malmström supports Swedish adoption of the euro currency, and in August 2007 she was one of the politicians calling for another referendum on euro membership (the first was in 2003). "We respect the result of the referendum, of course, but still think that one should be able to argue for something one believes in, a lot had changed since the 2003 referendum, Slovenia has joined, Malta and Cyprus are joining at the beginning of next year. Next year, at least two Baltic countries will join. In 2010 11 there could be eight or nine new members. The more members there are, the greater the political price of being outside, because we can't make a difference, Sweden had lost out economically by not joining the single European currency." She cited a report from the National Board of Trade: "We have lost 100 billion kronor in exports and the same amount in imports. Our trade with the eurozone would have been 13–14 percent greater if we had been members."

In July 2014, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt nominated Malmström for a second term as European Commissioner. By September, the European Parliament gave its support to her nomination. She assumed the duties of EU Commissioner for Trade on 1 November 2014, as a member of the Juncker Commission. Already in her nomination hearing, amid the Russo Ukrainian War, Malmström rejected Russia's demands for amendments to a free trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine. In December 2015, she failed in her final attempt to reach a breakthrough over Russia's concerns, some of which were contrary to European and World Trade Organization rules. The mission letter for Malmström's position also included, as one of her key duties, the "successful conclusion" of the controversial trade negotiations with the US, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), though with a number of restrictions and confinements to the negotiation mandate to address European public concerns over TTIP. Having expressed a view strongly in favour of the treaty, she tried to revive the negotiations with the USA two weeks after entering office. Despite claims of an "unprecedented level of transparency", the treaty drafts could not be read by all parliaments of EU member states, such as the German Bundestag, or political leaders such as then vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel. In May 2015, Malmström and Turkish Economy Minister Nihat Zeybekci announced a framework for broadening the European Union–Turkey Customs Union, extending it to include services, government contracting and most agricultural goods. Also under her leadership, the EU finalized the negotiations on a major trade agreement with Vietnam in August 2015, removing 99 per cent of tariffs between Europe and Vietnam over the following decade as well as non tariff barriers to trade, services, investment, intellectual property, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, government procurement, dispute settlement and sustainable development.

Since 2019, Malmström has been a visiting professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg. Also since 2019, she has been serving on the Transatlantic Task Force of the German Marshall Fund and the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation (BKHS), co chaired by Karen Donfried and Wolfgang Ischinger. In September 2020, the government of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven nominated Malmström as Sweden's candidate for secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (OECD). During the selection process, she became a finalist but ultimately lost out against Mathias Cormann in March 2021. From 2021 to 2022, Malmström was a member of the Trilateral Commission’s Task Force on Global Capitalism in Transition, chaired by Carl Bildt, Kelly Grier and Takeshi Niinami. In 2022, Malmström joined the Brussels office of law firm Covington & Burling as senior advisor. Since 2023, she has been part of the Centre for European Policy Studies/Heinrich Böll Foundation High Level Group on Bolstering EU Democracy, chaired by Kalypso Nicolaïdis. In May 2023, Malmström announced that she had quit the Swedish Liberal Party, due to her opposition to the party's participation in the Tidö Agreement.

In a discussion with John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, which he wrote about in The Independent on 12 October 2015, Malmström reportedly acknowledged "that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition" and is reported to have commented: "I do not take my mandate from the European people." Malmström later denied having said this, calling it a "fabricated quote" extrapolated from her explanations about the TTIP negotiation mandate, which is determined by the European governments and not by the Europeans themselves. She also argued before the European Parliament that she did take her mandate from the European people since she was approved as Commissioner by the MEPs who represent them. Hilary did not retract his version of the story. She is the author of several books, articles and essays on regional parties, regionalism, Spanish politics, European politics, immigration and terrorism.