The centre left ousted Erna Solbergs conservative government in a resounding victory in the general election in Norway on Monday. The left side of the Norwegian parliament can now muster 100 seats against 68 for the departing Prime Minister. Leader of the social democratic “Arbeiderpartiet” (labor party) Jonas Gahr Støre is now expected to form a coalition government.
Arbeiderpartiet actually didn’t do that well themselves, losing a seat and clogging their second worst result in a century, but resounding victories for the Centre party (Senterpartiet or SP) and for the socialists (Sosialistisk Venstreparti or SV) left the three parties with a comfortable majority.
For the hardcore enviromentalists in the Greens the election proved a disappointment. They gained ground, but not as much as expected. Climate and not least the future of Norway’s large oil production, which is the dominant mainstay of the economy, was a main theme in the election campaign and the Greens were predicted to get a major break through. They did get a solid victory in the capital Oslo, but failed to break out of their traditional stronghold here and went largely stagnant in other parts of the country, including the other large cities.
However both SP and SV have pretty high environmental profiles, and SV will enter coalition talks with a demand to stop all new exploration for more oil. The centrist SP sometimes have a hard time stomaching SV and will probably push for an Ap-SV minority government, but it’s not the climate policy that will be the stumbling block. SV/the Centre Pary is a pretty unique Norwegian construction with no affilliation to any of the dominant political ideologies in traditional Western political philosophy. It’s decidedly rural, grown out of a 19th century small farmers’ movement, has a somewhat nationalistic and local patriotic hue, sees itself as the guarantee against Norway joining the EU and fiercely backing the large subsidies that keep farming and local communities alive in the vast, far northerly and mountainous country. It thus has little of the market economy fetichism that tend to be the signature of farmers’ parties elsewhere, is traditionalist, but not overly social conservative, has a relatively high social profile when it comes to income distribution and relief for the poor and also a relatively high environmental profile. It gets nary a vote in the larger cities, but clogs over 50 % in some rural parts.
On the right side the election saw bruising losses for both Solberg’s Conservatives (pretty centrist by American standards) and for the far right populist Progress Party, that went into the election as the only party promising an expansion of oil production.
This pattern — losses or at least stagnation for the far right after several decades of gains, middling results for the old conservative and social democrat “power parties” and gains for the “alternative left”, meaning socialists and environmentalists, is actually mirroring both the results of the Danish general election of June 2019, and to some extent the results in Germany, Denmark and some of the other Northern European countries in the May 2019 European Parliament elections (though not in Southern and Eastern Europe, where the far right continued its march forward).
It’s worth noting here, that while the populist far right in Denmark and Norway is ususally a bit more moderate, is largely outside the fascist heritage of their European counterparts, and has to a larger extent been part of mainstream politics supporting or participating in right wing governments, it was also here that these parties had their first break through all the way back in the 1970’s and made large gains in the 1990’s and 2000’s. But momentum seems to have shifted away from them, not least because they have been helplessly late to the climate agenda, and their xenophobic appeal also seems to have lost some of its steam.
This now starts to look somewhat like a Northern European trend. Polls in the coming German election also shows the far right stalling its growth, though it at the moment seems to be the Social Democrats that are capitalizing as the Greens have stumbled in the election campaign and will probably register much more moderate gains than in the EP elections.
And just for context: I’m a Danish journalist living in Copenhagen. The cultures are close, the Danish and Norwegian political systems are pretty similar, and I read and understand Norwegian. But any Norwegians with more intimate knowledge — feel free to add and correct.