• Swedish election result a nightmare scenario
• Coalition talks in Sweden to block out far-right
• Sweden votes far-right into parliament

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who was re-elected on Sunday, is serious, discreet, collected ... in a word, a moderate, the name of the political party he's headed since 2003.

The 45-year-old father of three is known to lead a well-organised and settled existence, with a Saab in the garage of his house in the suburbs of Stockholm.

Married to a fellow Moderate politician, he has said he gets his kicks out of football and Swedish hot-dogs and doesn't mind doing the chores at home.

"I like things to be clean," he once said about his kitchen, a statement a lot have said sums up his personality.

Born August 4, 1965, the eldest of four children, he studied economics at Stockholm University and quickly became a career politician, like most of Sweden's political class.

He was voted into the Swedish parliament in 1991, and headed the Modarates' youth organisation from 1992 to 1995.

During that time, he tried to shake things up within the party, calling in a book entitled "The Sleeping Nation" for a liberal electrochoc to wake up Swedes.

In 1995, he lashed out the party's top brass and the entourage of Carl Bildt, who had just been ousted as prime minister, and as a result Reinfeldt was kept away from significant posts for four years.

"They treated me like I had the plague," he later wrote.

But when the Moderates suffered a big election blow in 2002, Reinfeldt quickly bounced back from his forced break and became party leader in 2003.

He softened his right-wing image and toned down criticism of Sweden's cherished welfare state, adopted more consensual and centrist policies, and gained in popularity with his reflective, attentive nature.

In the 2006 election, he formed a centre-right coalition with the Liberal, Centre and Christian Democrat parties, promising tax cuts and branding the Moderates as Sweden's "true labour party" to oust Goeran Persson's tired Social Democratic government.

Europe then discovered the tall, bald, baby-faced leader who boasts a slimmed-down figure after having once weighted over 100 kilos (220 pounds).

He named former foe Bildt foreign minister, gaining the loyalty of a more intellectual colleague, who can also be more curt and conservative.

But even though the moderates are still the "conservatives" of the "non-Socialist" coalition, Reinfeldt is considered both a market and social liberal, which has allowed him to gain ground in a country where the Social Democrats have dominated politics for the past 80 years.

He is set on cutting Sweden's taxes, which are among the highest in Europe, looking after public finances and carefully reforming the welfare state, while still portraying himself in the role of "father of the nation".

With close friend and finance minister Anders Borg at his side, Reinfeldt went through a rough spot during the global crisis.

"I have to say that during those long evenings where I was speaking with my finance minister for the 20th time that day, it was clear that we were near a collapse of the financial system in Sweden and all of Europe," he recently told the foreign press.

"Those were the longest hours and days of those four years," he said.

Reinfeldt's presidency of the EU in 2009 -- solid, and without any fuss -- was viewed as a success and Sweden's economy quickly bounced back from the global crisis.

Likeable and at ease in his role, he nevertheless rarely smiles and often looks sullen, something he himself has a hard time explaining.

"Those who've known me for a while say I'm a very joyous and happy person. They ask: where does that serious side come from," he has said.

Exit polls from Sunday's vote showed Reinfeldt's four-party Alliance was set to become the first right-leaning government to win a second term in nearly a century -- bringing a decisive end to the rival Social Democrats' 80-year domination of Swedish politics.

With just 49.1 percent of the vote, however, Reinfeldt's coalition was likely to be short of a majority of seats in parliament, which would force him to lure away parties from the opposition bloc to form a stable government.