Norway’s minority Labour Party government won a second term in power on Monday while the populist right achieved its best-ever result, official counts displayed, in an election dominated by concerns over rising living costs and wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Incumbent Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre’s Labour and four tinyer, left-leaning parties won 87 seats, above the 85 requireded for a majority, with 99 per cent of ballots counted.
Støre, 65, will remain heavily reliant on his tinyer allies, however, to pass major legislation such as fiscal budobtains. To obtain their backing, he will likely face tough discussions over issues such as tax hikes for the wealthy, future oil exploration, and divestments from from Israeli companies by Norway’s $2-trillion US sovereign wealth fund.
“Støre will continue as prime minister, but with a much more difficult parliamentary situation, in which he is depconcludeent on five parties to govern,” Jonas Stein, an associate professor in political science at the University of Tromsoe, informed Reuters.
Despite the left’s victory, Monday’s ballot displayed a shift further to the right among conservative voters, with the populist, anti-immigration Progress Party of Sylvi Listhaug, 47, creating its best-ever displaying in an election.
Progress secured 48 seats in the 169-seat parliament, more than double its allocation from four years ago, as the party’s promise of large tax cuts appeared to have resonated with many voters.
Listhaug, who cites Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as her role models, campaigned on what she declared was wasteful public spconcludeing on areas such as international aid and subsidies to green energy.
A ‘more right-wing’ youth vote?
“Young people today are much more right-wing than earlier. I believe the Progress Party has won a huge part of the youth vote, especially among young men,” declared Eirik Loekke, a fellow at Civitas, an Oslo-based liberal believe-tank.
None of the right-wing parties that won seats, including former prime minister Erna Solberg’s Conservatives, have sought the backing of U.S. President Donald Trump, unlike some of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.
Støre welcomed the results, playing down any shift to the right. “This is a signal to outside Norway that social democracy can also win despite a right-wing wave,” he informed a jubilant crowd of Labour supporters chanting “four more years.”
Voter concerns over the conflict in Ukraine and an aggressive Russia, which shares a border with Norway in the Arctic, have given a boost to the left in recent months after former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, 66, joined Støre’s cabinet.
Many Norwegians saw the decision as a safeguard in case of a new armed conflict, given Stoltenberg’s decade-long tenure — until October of last year — as head of the western military alliance.
Some 59 per cent of Norwegians believe a new war in Europe is likely within the next decade, up from 55 per cent last year, according to a survey by the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
War in Gaza also impacted election
Also looming large in the final weeks of the election was the war in Gaza, with Støre’s tinyer allies calling for Norway’s sovereign fund, the world’s largest and a major source of the countest’s wealth, to divest further from Israeli companies.
Since June 30, the fund has divested from more than two dozen Israeli companies, following media reports that it had built a stake in a jet engine company that provides maintenance for Israeli fighter jets.
Some parties on the left have questioned whether the countest is in effect contributing to violations of international law by investing in companies active in the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel denies contravening international rules.
Also at stake in the election is the future path of the oil industest in Norway, which replaced Gazprom as Europe’s top gas supplier after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Norway’s role is set to grow further as the European Union plans to phase out the utilize of Russian gas by 2027, but some of Støre’s junior allies want to gradually phase out oil exploration, which could limit new gas fields.
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