Jacobin Magazine: The Fall of the Norwegian Trump

For a long time the Norwegian establishment refused to collaborate with the FrP, seeing it as too extreme. They changed their mind out of electoral expediency. Needing votes to secure a majority, right-wing parties invited the FrP into the mainstream tent and welcomed their collaboration. Since then, mainstream right parties have assured the public that the Norwegian populist right is not like it is in others parts of Europe — it’s milder and moderate, less historically noxious. While the Sweden Democrats have an outright Nazi past, the FrP’s roots are in an anti-tax liberal party. [...]

Listhaug became city commissioner (byråd) of welfare and social services in Oslo in 2006, where she pressed for more competition and more private-sector involvement in government. After working for a consulting firm, she then entered the right-wing coalition government in 2013 as minister of agriculture and food. While still largely unknown, she stirred controversy and fear among farmers for her statements in 2010 that Norway’s agricultural policy was a “communist system.” [...]

Then that December, Listhaug was appointed to a newly created cabinet position: minister of immigration and integration. It was both shocking and expected. Shocking because the conservative right, who claimed to be moderate, chose the most prominent anti-immigrant voice as minister of immigration. And expected because the FrP’s had netted 16 percent of the votes when they joined the coalition. They were strong enough to get what they wanted, and they wanted Listhaug in charge of immigration and a platform to spread the party’s views. Listhaug quickly made the best of it. Shortly after she stepped into the new position, in late December 2015, Listhaug vowed to make Norway’s asylum policies “one of the strictest in Europe.”

read the article

YES! Magazine: In Norway, Racism Is Losing. Here’s Why

At first it seems a paradox that expressions of racism can intensify even while substantial progress is being made. On reflection, I realized why: Those on the losing side will fight harder exactly because they see they are losing. [...]

It’s true that some job discrimination and random insults from ethnic Norwegians do continue, but from the point of view of committed racists in Norway, the situation is alarming. Muslim women are pursuing excellence in university studies; Afro-Norwegians are taking influential jobs. One in 5 Norwegians is foreign-born—a higher proportion than in Britain or the U.S.—and more immigrants are arriving. [...]

The forces for and against racism continue to experiment with different tactics as the conflict continues. The largest and most mainstream force doing fear-mongering about immigration is the Progress Party. The party picked up a racist thread that has historically been a part of Norwegian culture and hopes to persuade the citizenry that immigration is “not working.” [...]

The lesson from Scandinavia is that those Black American leaders are right. When Americans of goodwill focus on the level of words and gestures and statues, they severely limit their effectiveness. Racism is much more than culture. If the anti-racist Norwegians and Swedes did not have their economic model of universal services backing them up, they might be losing their struggle now instead of winning it. Free university and vocational education, full employment policies, universal health care and child care, subsidized housing and mass transit, support for new entrepreneurs, and other measures all spell “opportunity” for everyone in capital letters.

read the article

The Atlantic: What Right-Wing Populists Look Like in Norway

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.

read the article

openDemocracy: Scandinavian Nazis on the march again

A majority of the demonstrating neo-Nazis in Kristiansand this summer were in fact not Norwegian, but Swedish. They were hard-core members of a violent neo-Nazi outfit which goes under the name of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Den Nordiska Motstandsbevegelsen, DNM). In Sweden, this movement has a particularly strong organization in the largely rural province of Dalarna. [...]

In Sweden and in Finland, members of this movement has been involved in murders of immigrants and anti-racist campaigners, and in murderous arson attacks on asylum reception centers. Key members of this movement are known to have undergone military training with Russian ultra-nationalist forces.  A joint investigation by Filter Media in Norway and Expo in Sweden found that among the Swedish neo-Nazis demonstrators in Kristiansand there were individuals with criminal records relating to violent assaults on police, immigrants and anti-racist activists. [...]

The neo-Nazi march in Kristiansand happened on the watch of a Progress Party Minister of Justice, Per-Willy Amundsen, who in his former days as an MP had a long and sustained record of whipping up popular sentiment against immigrants and Muslims in Norway. Six years ago, Amundsen, then an MP, went on record as approving a fellow party politician who had drawn an analogy between Islam and Nazism.  Amundsen is surrounded by cabinet ministers from his own party some of whom have in the course of the past four years been caught greeting well-known Norwegian right-wing extremists with a friendly ‘good night, and thank you’ on their open Facebook pages, and sharing Facebook posts from a British right-wing extremist organization, Britain First .

read the article