Leader of The Left Party
In 1993 Schyman was elected party leader for the Left Party.
Schyman's greatest asset was her appeal to the voters, and her party more than doubled its number of MPs during her leadership. She gained popularity for her candor; for example, she is open about her struggle with alcoholism and has supported the initiative to make the Riksdag an alcohol-free workplace. During her period as party president, the party adopted feminism as an ideological basis. In 2003 she was charged with misleading the tax authorities by attempting to take illicit tax deductions. She was temporarily succeeded by Ulla Hoffmann.
In 2002 she made a controversial speech concerning men's oppression of women, in which she said "The discrimination and the violations appears in different shapes depending on where we find ourselves. But it's the same norm, the same structure, the same pattern, that is repeated both in the Taliban's Afghanistan and here in Sweden".
In October 2004, Schyman together with other MEPs of the Left Party proposed before the Riksdag, a national assessment of the cost of men's violence towards women; furthermore they demanded that the state fund women's shelters. The proposal attracted wide attention, with the media calling it a "man tax."
Read more about this topic: Gudrun Schyman
Famous quotes containing the words leader of, leader, left and/or party:
“To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.”
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939)
“The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.... The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“I was glad to have got out of the towns, where I am wont to feel unspeakably mean and disgraced,—to have left behind me for a season the bar-rooms of Massachusetts, where the full-grown are not weaned from savage and filthy habits,—still sucking a cigar. My spirits rose in proportion to the outward dreariness. The towns needed to be ventilated. The gods would be pleased to see some pure flames from their altars. They are not to be appeased with cigar-smoke.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one’s party three times a day.”
—Jean Rostand (1894–1977)