ONE of the longest-serving leaders in Europe is facing a young challenger from the resurgent Right who has transformed his party’s appeal, particularly to first-time voters.

Göran Persson’s ten-year grip on power in Sweden is being threatened by Fredrik Reinfeldt, who has ditched his tie along with a raft of right-wing policies, adopted a modern pale blue logo and spoken at a gay pride event.

Mr Reinfeldt does not have as much hair as David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, but their stories have striking similarities. They even occasionally chat on the phone.

But Mr Reinfeldt has also studied at the Tony Blair school of renewal, renaming his party the New Moderates last year. “Blair and Cameron both understand that you have to be able to say that everyone can vote for them,” Mr Reinfeldt, 41, told The Times during a break in campaigning in Uppsala before the general election on September 17.

“That sometimes might mean a conflict with smaller interest groups in your own party, but you have to demonstrate that you have the power and confidence in your own policies. I was elected on a mandate of change to renew the Moderates. David Cameron is in the same process. It is good for the people that they have got modern leaders who are open to change.”

Mr Reinfeldt’s core appeal is based on lowering high income tax and using benefit cuts to invest in what he calls real jobs as opposed to the Social Democrats’ training schemes.

Mr Persson is pushing green policies and promising more of the high-tax policies that support the so-called Swedish Model, which is widely cited as the most successful and generous social system of childcare, schools, healthcare and public transport in Europe.

But, unlike his predecessors on the Right, Mr Reinfeldt is not talking of dismantling it. “In the 1970s there was a clear difference of ideology, with real socialism standing against a market economy,” he said. “But it is a new kind of world now and the ideology from the past is not really valid. We are not asking for a mandate to tear anything down.

“We are asking for support for job-creation policies and to focus more on results from the school and healthcare system.”

Mr Persson, 57, bought a large farm last year and has talked about his desire for a new life there with his third wife. Mr Reinfeldt has said: “[Mr Persson] has introduced many times the question that he is soon to be leaving . . . I think the perception is that I have the future ahead of me and he has his future behind him.” This sounds rather like Mr Cameron’ s taunt of Mr Blair: “He was the future once.”

Mr Persson has fuelled this perception with increasingly eccentric outbursts. Dismissing a poll showing him behind Mr Reinfeldt, Mr Persson said: “When I want to know the state of the opinion polls, I talk to the statues in the Great Yard of the Sagerska [his residence in Stockholm]. They are better than opinion polls.”

When a nine-year-old girl asked on a school campaigning visit whether he wanted a pet, the veteran leader gave an unexpectedly detailed reply. “I haven’t got a pet now,” Mr Persson said. “But we are going to buy a dog. We live in the countryside and we don’t know if it will be a labrador, a golden retriever, a Rhodesian ridgeback or a dachshund or two.”

Political commentators were thrown into a frenzy, concluding that the Prime Minister’s mind was focused more on his own retirement plans than the next four years for Sweden.

Henrik Brors, chief political writer of the broadsheet Dagens Nyheter, said: “Göran Persson says he will stay for four more years but everyone suspects he will only go on for two years if he wins. The problem is, who will run the country after that? The crown princes are not popular. There was just Anna Lindh.”

The third anniversary of the murder of the popular Foreign Minister is only six days before polling day.

Lena Mellin, political commentator at Aftonbladet, the biggest tabloid, said: “The election is about whether you are tired with the Social Democrats or not. Mr Reinfeldt has changed the Moderates 180 degrees. Now their policies are much closer to the Social Democrats.”

Victory for Mr Reinfeldt would make him Sweden’s youngest Prime Minister. After three years leading the opposition he has united the four-party rightwing alliance to put them narrowly ahead in the polls.

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERIK REINFELDT

• Age 41
• Married with three children
• Filippa, his wife, is mayor of a Stockholm suburb and known as “Hillary Clinton” to party insiders
• Spent 15 months’ military service with the army in the frozen north of Sweden
• MBA from Stockholm University
• First elected to Parliament in 1991, aged 26
• Chairman of rightwing Youth League 1992
• 2001-2 Chairman of Justice Select Committee
• Chairman of the rightwing Moderate Party since 2003
• Grew up in a terraced house in a poor Stockholm suburb, where he was a keen basketball player in a successful multiracial team
• His favourite TV programme as a youngster was Not the Nine O’Clock News, which inspired him to perform his own satirical sketches. This won him an award as best comedian at his school

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