After Utøya, voters elect moderation

Published on 13 September 2011 at 12:32

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“Conservatives jubilant,” headlines Norwegian daily Aftenposten, followingregional and municipal elections won by the opposition, led by Erna Solberg. The Social Democratic Party of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg nonetheless remains the leading party with 31% of the vote. As for its partner within the ruling ‘red-green’ coalition, the Socialist Left, it tallied its worse score at municipal elections since 1979. A month and a half after the massacre of young Social Democrats perpetrated by right-wing extremist Anders Breivik, voters thus chose moderate parties. The Conservatives are the winners because they obtained their best score at municipal elections since 1979, the paper explains. Their rise is at the expense of the other major right-wing party, the Progress Party (FrP populist and anti-immigration), of which Breivik was a member, and which felt the backlash of the July 22 attack. In Oslo, the FrP’s score was clearly a “disaster”, writes leader writer Harald Stanghelle, for whom this “national tragedy undoubtedly mobilised the voters but didn’t lead to upheaval in Norwegian politics”. The election will nonetheless “have major political implications because it is the beginning of the end of the coalition as we know it today,” Stanghelle predicts.

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