What
Right-Wing Populists Look Like in Norway
Can they
avoid the nativism of their European peers?
By Emily
Schultheis
September
12, 2017
Yesterday
was a good day for Norway’s populist Progress Party. Results in the country’s
parliamentary elections on Monday show it nearly maintained its support from
four years ago and, along with the Conservative Party, its coalition partner,
appears headed for another four years of governing in this traditionally
left-wing country, as support for the center-left Labor Party drops to historic
lows. Buoyed by its anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric, the Progress Party
received 15.3 percent of the vote here, barely a percentage point lower than in
2013.
Taking the
stage late Monday to supporters’ chants of “Four new years!” Progress Party
leader Siv Jensen thanked the party's voters and said she was “proud” of their
performance and its supporters.
By any
objective standard, the Progress Party is among the most successful right-wing
populist parties in Europe: it’s the third-largest party in Norway and, unlike
many of its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, is actively serving in a
governing coalition in Oslo’s parliament. This is a not-insignificant feat for
a populist party—and its expected four more years in government are a seeming
endorsement of the coalition’s right-wing tack on immigration. It would be easy
to look at Progress and arrive at a broad conclusion that, after a string of
less-than-successful elections for similar parties across Europe, this
anti-immigration, anti-Islam party is a bright spot for the movement heading
into another round of key European elections this fall.
But the
Progress Party, while similar to its populist counterparts further south in
Europe, isn’t quite the same. At its core a neoliberal economic party, it has
never been nearly as far-right as the Front National in France or Alternative
für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, and has further worked to moderate its
message and its rhetoric during its four years in government. In fact, experts
who study these parties in Europe wouldn’t classify the Progress Party as a
radical right-wing populist party, at least in the same sense that Le Pen’s
Front National is—though it’s certainly true that the Progress Party has
capitalized on nativist sentiment to help improve their vote share in recent
years.
“It’s fair
to say that the Progress Party in Norway is more of a moderate right-wing
populist party than the Front National in France, for example, or even the
Sweden Democrats [in Sweden],” Johannes Bergh, who runs the Norwegian National
Election Studies at the Institute of Social Research in Oslo, told me. “They
try to have more of a certain acceptable rhetoric when it comes to
immigration—that has been sort of a conscious strategy for them. To get into
government, they had to tone down the most extreme elements of their party.”
A big part
of that comparatively moderate tone, Norwegian political experts told me, is
the fact that the Progress Party was founded decades ago as a libertarian,
anti-bureaucracy and anti-establishment party. For a long time, its primary
message had more to do with economic issues than it did with immigration—though
stricter immigration has been a part of the party’s platform since the 1980s,
it is less of a one-issue party than other populist parties seeking electoral
success further south.
“It has to
do, essentially, with priorities,” Cas Mudde, an expert on European right-wing
populist parties at the University of Georgia, told me. “Nativism isn’t really
the core of their agenda, and they’re also still very neoliberal, which parties
like the Front National of course are not.” Right-wing populism in Scandinavia
is “very diverse,” Mudde added, referring not just to Norway’s Progress Party
but to the Finns Party in Finland, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and the
Danish People’s Party in Denmark. “Almost none of the parties is a really good,
perfect fit for what we see as the prototype, such as Front National.”
Another part
of the Progress Party’s relative success in 2017 has been, interestingly
enough, the fact that it’s served four years in a governing coalition with
Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Many populist parties struggle when
they make the transition from opposition to governing—but experts here say the
Progress Party has been more successful than most at toning down rhetoric and
actually taking part in legislating. In the current government, it heads
Norway’s Ministry for Migration and Integration, among other key ministerial
positions; if the preliminary results hold, it’s likely to continue leading key
ministries in Norway’s government. This has given the party an opportunity to
take credit for recent government accomplishments.
“A lot of
people expected the Progress Party to sort of fail as a governing party because
they’re an opposition, anti-establishment type of party,” Bergh told me. “But
they’ve managed to have a double type of communication, where they do take
responsibility for policy they implement but at the same time they have this
anti-establishment, anti-immigration rhetoric. They’ve been criticized for not
being consistent, but it seems to work nonetheless.”
That
difference in rhetoric was apparent on the Friday before election day in Oslo,
as Progress Party volunteers and party members campaigned at their booth on
popular Karl Johans Gate. The big local pre-election event of the day was a
debate over energy issues between Progress Party politician Terje Søviknes, the
current Minister of Petroleum and Energy, and a counterpart from the Green
Party. The pair debated back and forth spiritedly but politely from chairs in
the party’s booth; a few dozen onlookers meandered up and listened in.
The party
advocates for a “strict and responsible” immigration policy, saying the number
of immigrants and refugees admitted to Norway should be drastically decreased
and calling for tightened rules on claiming asylum and on refugees or
immigrants bringing family members to Norway. It also calls for a ban on burqas
in public spaces, and argues that elements of Islam are incompatible with
Norwegian society.
Johan
Hertzberg, a 23-year-old law student from Oslo manning the volunteer table,
said he doesn’t view his party as a populist party—and that he believes Norway
is capable of having a “civilized” debate about immigration issues. He first
got involved when he had a sick grandparent looking at options for nursing
homes, and suggested that many supporters who get involved with the Progress
Party do so for reasons besides just immigration.
“We’re not
anything like the AfD or anything like the Sweden Democrats or anything like
the Front National in France,” he said. “Especially when you look at how the
AfD is talking about it, [saying] they want to shoot migrants on the
border—that is quite extreme.”
It’s true
that the Progress Party’s anti-Islam rhetoric is restrained compared with the
election-season rhetoric in nearby Germany. For example: There, AfD posters
designed solely to stoke anti-Islam sentiment abound. (“Burqas? We prefer
bikinis,” one poster says, featuring the posteriors of two bikini-clad women.)
Still, an electronic billboard in Oslo’s Central train station in the lead-up
to Election Day displayed a Progress Party ad calling for a burqa ban in public
spaces, a key tenet of the party’s platform on immigration. And in its active
social media presence, similar messages often appear.
“Within
Norway they function as the radical right party, as being the party that is
most anti-immigrant, most anti-immigration, that kind of has this populist
discourse,” Mudde explained. “But in the European context, they’re much more
moderate than the Front National or AfD.”
As political
observers across the West look to take meaning from each European election on
the calendar this year, Norway is a bit of a tough data point to place: it’s
true that its populist party, the one most similar to other European far-right
parties, held its own in what was expected to be a tough year for it. Whether
that party continues its more moderate tone in government remains to be
seen—but the implications for right-wing populism in Europe and beyond are
murky at best.
About the
Author
Emily
Schultheis is a writer based in Berlin with a fellowship from the Institute of
Current World Affairs. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The
Guardian, and Politico, among other publications.
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