Lindh was then appointed national chairwoman of the SSU – a job in which, according to one Social Democrat insider, she had to withstand “some tough party tests”.

Lindh is already well-known in Brussels after four years as environment minister in the first Persson government, and has a reputation for being an efficient negotiator and tough deal-maker. She fought hard for certain issues, but disappointed the Greens back home by not taking a stance against genetically modified organisms.

During her time at the environment ministry, Lindh liaised closely with Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard’s cabinet. Officials there regarded her as a model minister, with strong convictions but also a clear sense of what was practically and politically possible.

Those who have worked with her suggest this is a result of her legal background. In debates within the environment ministry, according to one official, she always came down on the side of reason, “when some of the more ludicrous proposals came from the ecologists”.

But she worked tirelessly to win support for action on issues about which she felt strongly. She is credited with masterminding the agreement on key environmental pledges reached at the June summit of EU leaders in Cardiff and succeeded in persuading the Council of Ministers to endorse a series of measures to combat acidification.

Lindh’s success as a negotiator stems in part from the clear and distinct language she uses to get her message across.

Talking to the group of foreign ambassadors in Stockholm two days after she was nominated for the job of foreign minister, she outlined three key elements which would govern her approach to the task ahead.

First, she said, she was pro-Europe when Sweden entered the EU but was now even more so, in stark contrast to many of her compatriots. Her remarks were probably the first uncritical comments made about Sweden’s membership by any government minister since the country joined the Union nearly four years ago.

Secondly, said Lindh, she believed there was a strong link between domestic policies and foreign affairs issues, making it clear that the Swedish foreign office would not work in isolation while she was in charge.

Thirdly, she told ambassadors, she had two young boys aged four and eight, which was why she was unlikely to accept many dinner invitations.

When the list of members of the new Persson government was presented to parliament, a buzz went round the benches. Lindh’s nomination came as a complete surprise, partly because everyone had assumed that the sturdy Lena Hjelm-Wallén – now deputy prime minister and EU coordinator ahead of Sweden’s presidency of the Union in 2001 – would stay in the job.

The other reason was, quite simply, that she is so young. A foreign minister, muttered the old guard, should not look like an enthusiastic jogger, with blond hair bobbing on her shoulders. One of her more middle-aged political colleagues who appeared a bit overwhelmed by her energy remarked, with a tired sigh, that she still saw herself as “a representative of the young”.

But while her appointment came as a surprise, no one suggested that she did not have enough experience for the job. By the age of 26, as a chairwoman of the National Council of Swedish Youth, Lindh had attended and chaired more international meetings than most Swedes ever do and had added a command of Spanish to her mastery of the English language and working knowledge of French.

As vice-chairwoman of the International Union of Socialist Youth in the late Eighties, she travelled widely and built up a network of contacts which could prove useful to her now.

While she was environment minister, Lindh took her bicycle helmet to every meeting, commuting from Nyköping, a one-hour train ride away from the Swedish capital. Now she is adjusting to life as foreign minister, reportedly ordering the occasional limousine to get home from Stockholm in time to see her children before they go to bed and her husband Bo Holmberg.

Holmberg was married and a minister for civil affairs when he was swept off his feet by Lindh, then the head of the Social Democrats’ youth organisation. Their relationship caused a minor furore, and Holmberg left the government, and party politics, to become county governor of Nyköping.

Tough as nails, and unabashed, Lindh has not always been popular with the Social Democrat Party leadership.

While at the helm of the SSU, she upset some of the old guard at the party’s 1991 conference by demanding radical changes in policy on such sensitive ideological issues as individual rights, collectivism and corporatism – all solid pillars of the party’s traditional platform.

The then Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson lost patience, and Lindh was relegated to local politics in Stockholm, as head of cultural affairs. One of her political opponents from this time says that while she did the job efficiently, her heart was not in it. As chairwoman of the Stockholm city theatre, she attended some premieres, but this was more out of a sense of duty than because of any real interest in culture.

With strong support from women and young Social Democrats, Lindh was elected in 1991 as a member of the VU, the party’s powerful executive committee where strings are pulled and political strategies worked out.

It is virtually impossible to become foreign minister in a Social Democratic government without solid support from the party’s rank-and-file members. That may partly explain why Lindh was chosen for the job rather than Pierre Schori, minister for developing countries and another possible contender. He has an unbeatable international track record but is an intellectual, not a man of the Rörelse.

Now that she is in the foreign ministry, Lindh will have to fight hard to retain her power base.

When she was environment minister, she quickly discovered that most policies emanated from the prime minister’s cabinet. Her influence was undermined from the start by the recruitment of two environmental specialists who became the architects of party policy on green issues.

Her budget was also reduced, with more money going instead to local authorities for housing projects, and she had to shoulder the blame for the redundancies in Sweden’s environmental protection agency which followed.