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. [...]
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. [...]
“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.” [...]
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.
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