by LUKAS SLOTHUUS
At the beginning of the year, Norway looked set to elect the most right-wing government in its history. The right-populist Progress Party was surging in the polls while the centre-left government was in disarray, with the Centre Party withdrawing from the Labour-led coalition after a row over further integration into European energy markets. Yet in the parliamentary elections of 8 September, the incumbent Labour Party staged a recovery – clinging onto power with a slightly increased vote share of 28 per cent. Jonas Gahr Støre now leads a second government, this time principally supported by the Red Party, Socialist Left and Greens, which won a combined 16 per cent, rather than its erstwhile coalition partner, which collapsed to 6 per cent. On the right, power shifted to the more radical Progress Party, led by Sylvi Listhaug, nearly doubled its share to 24 per cent, overtaking Erna Solberg’s Conservatives, which dropped to 15 per cent. According to its own post-election evaluation, the Conservatives – who ruled from 2013 to 2021 – were punished in part for not having a sufficiently distinct platform to the Progress Party, with whom they faced the widely unpopular prospect of governing in coalition.
Both Labour and Conservatives ran on the same set of issues: welfare, the cost of living, national security. In the televised debates, the urban-rural divide was high on the agenda – a perennial subject in a country with the lowest population density in mainland Europe. The Conservatives campaigned for increased privatisation of healthcare to cut waiting lists, and tax cuts, even for the rich; Labour’s headline pledges were a hospital waiting list cap, cutting the cost of nursery fees and a fixed-price electricity scheme. On national security, meanwhile, the parties were united in preaching loyalty to NATO, full-throated support for Ukraine and a large-scale increase in military spending. Indeed, Labour – whose finance minister is former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg – has made NATO membership a red line for any coalition with the left parties, and Støre’s government last year pledged to double the defence budget, touting the proposal as a ‘historic boost’.
Militarism was the ‘cause above all causes’ in the election according to Aftenposten, Norway’s paper of record. Bordering Russia in the Arctic, the spectre of the Cold War looms large in a country that once refused permanent foreign bases or the stationing of nuclear weapons on its soil to avoid antagonising the USSR. Tensions with Russia rose after a significant increase in American troops from 2018 and bomber planes were stationed in 2021. Norway is now set to be a maritime stronghold for NATO in the strategically vital gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK, as well as the broader North, Norwegian and Barents Sea area.
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