Carl Gustaf Ekman (6 October 1872 – 15 June 1945) was a Swedish politician. He was a Member of Parliament from 1911 to 1932 (serving in both lower and upper houses), leader of the Freeminded People's Party between 1924 and 1932, and served as Prime Minister from 1926 to 1928 and again from 1930 to 1932. Biography Carl Gustaf Ekman was born in Munktorp (now Köping Municipality) in Västmanland County, to farmer and soldier Carl Ekman and Josefina Säfström. He began working at the age of twelve as a farmhand, read everything he could get his hands on, and was entrusted with duties inside the temperance movement, where he became a functionary. He was promoted to director of the Friends of the Temperance Movement's disability and burial fund in the industrial town of Eskilstuna. In 1908 he was appointed as chief editor of the liberal newspaper Eskiltuna-Kuriren. His attempt to be elected to the Riksdag failed because of the domination of the Social Democrats in Eskiltuna, but in 1911 the Liberal Party gave him a seat in the upper house for the county of Gävleborg. He quickly established himself as the country's leading proponent of total prohibition of alcohol. In 1913 he moved to Stockholm, and quickly won a seat representing the city in the Riksdag. Ekman became the most influential and controversial politician of the 1920s. Among Social Democrats he was regarded as a "class traitor", having come from a working-class background, but having become a member of a non-socialist party. He was in fact behind the downfall of several Social Democrat governments: Hjalmar Branting's in 1923, Rickard Sandler's in 1926, but also that of Arvid Lindman in 1930. In 1924 Ekman became the leader of the newly formed Freeminded People's Party (Frisinnade folkpartiet), after those Liberals opposed to prohibition had departed to form the Liberal Party of Sweden. As party leader he worked to strengthen the party's influence by cooperating with both the right and left. His strategy for power was based on controlling the political center in order to 'control the game', this being predicated upon no one bloc having a clear majority in the Riksdag. After Sandler's fall from power in 1926, Ekman became Prime Minister for the first time. He was able to play the right off against the left by appealing to both and by doing so he became more successful than expected. He