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THE NORWEGIAN GENERAL ELECTION: CONFLICTS RIGHT AND LEFT
15.09.2009

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg can send a thank-you letter to the quarrellers in the Liberal Party and Progress Party for making him one of the few social democrat leaders to have won an election in Europe this year. The question now is how long the re-elected red-green government can hold together.

For PM Jens Stoltenberg, the parliamentary election of 2009 has been a personal triumph. His closing message – “vote for a prime minister” – pushed the Labour Party over the important 35% boundary. Because of our election system this ensured a continued socialist majority in number of seats, despite the non-socialist parties achieving a greater total number of votes than the red-green block.

On the non-socialist side, the election was dominated by the public quarrel between the Liberal Party and the Progress Party. Infighting by the opposition is a strategy that has even been given its own name: Election Defeat. History has shown that an opposition that fights publicly during an election never wins an election. The non-socialist parties did not succeed in showing what they would use a new majority for, other than to continue the fighting. The voters responded by pushing the Liberal Party below the representation threshold (minimum percentage of votes required for representation), and abandoning the Progress Party, which as a result performed much worse than opinion polls had predicted at the start of the election campaign. The peacemakers in the Conservative Party took votes from both parties, and made the largest seat gain of any party. Although the Conservative Party now has a unique opportunity to become Norway’s largest opposition party over the course of the next four years, the election must be bitter for Erna Solberg, who would in all likelihood have become our next prime minister if the majority had swung to the non-socialist side during the course of election night. So close, but still so far away.

Jens Stoltenberg is likely to use the re-election for a major government reshuffle, and to put forward proposals that he did not dare to make prior to the parliamentary election. Even though it is likely that the majority government will sit for the entire four-year period, government attrition and difficult political cases may quickly lead forces in the Socialist Left Party to demand that the party leave the government. At the same time, many in the Labour Party would prefer to govern alone, and the election result has made it less likely that the Labour Party will allow the Socialist Left Party to win internal disputes, such as about oil drilling in the north. A second term is always difficult for a coalition government, and it is entirely possible that Jens Stoltenberg will in the end have to dissolve the coalition and form a pure Labour Party government. The big question is therefore whether the red-green block will now take over the lead role in the soap opera that is Norwegian politics.

Audun Sommerli Time