Cecilia Malmström

Confusing Cecilia Malmstrom — Europe’s trade commissioner — for a soft Swedish liberal is a costly mistake.

Each time the Trump administration makes a move in global trade, Malmstrom is standing in the wings ready to seize another chunk of the spotlight.

Since the inauguration of Trump, Malmstrom has nailed trade agreements with Japan, Canada and Mexico. Vietnam and Latin America’s Mercosur bloc are next in her cross hairs.

Few know how to compete with Trump in boiling the politics of trade down to relatable factoids, but Malmstrom does it with ease: “I ask someone what kind of job they have. I explain where the imports and exports go in that field. I look at their phone and explain that it contains contents from 50 to 60 countries, all traded across the world. I tell them it would be more expensive or impossible if it came from only one country.”

The Swedish Francophile escaped her rainy hometown of Gothenburg to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked as a psychiatric nurse before winning election to the European Parliament at age 31 in 1999. There she made her name as a critic of the EU’s Russia strategy, before being hauled back into national politics to run Sweden’s presidency of the EU in 2009.

A chronic overachiever, Malmstrom is also an academic expert in Western Europe’s separatist movements and speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.

“Cecilia is the perfect mix of analytic and emotional intelligence. She makes you feel good, she listens, but she’s incredibly tough,” says her colleague Carlos Moedas, a Goldman Sachs alumnus who runs the EU’s $100 billion research arm.

What’s the most Swedish thing about Malmstrom? This author found her lining up for a public bus in Stockholm in 2016. That aside, she says “it’s not ABBA, it’s that Sweden being a very trade-dependent country over hundreds of years makes me open. I want people to be involved. There is nothing conspirative about trade negotiations. Sometimes you need a one-to-one away from TV cameras, but mostly you need advice: from NGOs, from consumers, from industry. Let them be involved and demystify it.”

If you want to get into Malmstrom head, her tip is to read the books of Karl Popper. “He’s rational. Optimism is a duty, reason is celebrated, and things are possible.”

She’ll need that optimism with trade wars looming close on the horizon through 2018.

“Yes, there is a crisis, we are not in any sort of denial,” she told Playbook. But the Trump disruption “has made the rest of us more determined to move on. If America is turning slightly inwards, we will go on.”

How would that work? “We could try to be more flexible for those who do want to move on. For example 70 to 80 countries want e-commerce rules. Let us try to set up something, others could join later.” — Ryan Heath

Headshot by Stephanie Lecocq/AFP/Getty Images. Story photo by Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images.