The Riksdag (officially Swedish: Sveriges riksdag, literally: The National Diet of Sweden) is the national legislative assembly of Sweden. The riksdag is a unicameral assembly with 349 members (Swedish: riksdagsledamöter), who are elected on a proportional basis to serve fixed terms of four years. The Riksdag building stands on the island of Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm.
In 1995 it was revealed that the Swedish politician Mona Sahlin had bought, among other things, two bars of Toblerone using her Riksdag credit card. This became known as the Toblerone affair. Sahlin was forced to step down as a candidate for the post as Prime Minister. She returned to politics in 1998 (In October 1995 the newspaper Expressen revealed that Sahlin, who was then serving as Deputy Prime Minister and was widely seen as the main candidate to succeed Ingvar Carlsson as Prime Minister, had charged more than 50,000 Swedish kronor for private expenses on her working charge card, which was only for working expenses.[3] She had used the card to buy clothes, and to rent a private car (the money was always repaid, and Sahlin described how she saw use of the card as "advance pay"). Sahlin also claimed that the work charge card and her private charge card looked exactly the same and that some of the work charges were unintentionally debited as personal expenses. Sahlin decided to take the case to court to prove her innocence and be cleared of all accusations of misconduct. During this controversy it was also revealed that Sahlin had many unpaid parking fines at the Swedish Enforcement Administration, and that she often had missed or been late in paying her children's kindergarten fees.[4]
On 16 October 1995 Sahlin declared that she would take a time out from politics, and on 10 November she announced her resignation from the Swedish government as well as the Social Democratic Party leadership candidacy.[4] She left her seat in the parliament in April 1996 but continued to sit as a member of the executive council of the Social Democrats. The criminal charges against her were eventually dropped. The controversy was dubbed as the "Toblerone affair" after a statement Sahlin made during a press conference when she said: "I bought two Toblerone, diapers and cigarettes".
In 1996 Sahlin's autobiography Med mina ord ("With My Words") was published. The book dealt mostly with the Toblerone affair)
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