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Friday, July 01, 2005

The coming national election in Norway

In a new poll (article in Norwegian) released today, 56% asked would like Labor leader Jens Stoltenberg to become the new Prime Minister after the upcoming election in September.

For those of you who don’t know that much about Norwegian politics, Norway has had a coalition government consisting of the Conservative, Christian Democrat and Liberal party for the last 5 years. Since this coalition got less than 50% of the seats in the Norwegian parliament, Stortinget, they have been dependent on support from other parties for their politics, and have mostly gotten it from the populist Progress party. The Prime Minister for this government has been the Christian Democrat leader Kjell Magne Bondevik. As Prime Minister Bondevik has been loosing support for several years now, and about a week ago the leader of the Progress Party, Karl I Hagen, said that there was no way (article in English) that the Progress Party would support the sitting right-wing government as long as Bondevik continued as Prime Minister.

In the upcoming election there’s a left-wing coalition to challenge the sitting government, consisting of the Labor, Socialist left and the Centre party. Their candidate for Prime Minister is Stoltenberg.

I have many thoughts and opinions on this topic, as will no doubt be shown through this blog as election time comes closer. First of all I’ll let you know that I myself am a member of the Labor party, and was even elected into local government in my home community, Aasnes, for the Labor Part in 1999.

Today's poll shows that 44% of those likely to vote for the Progress party, and 30% of those likely to vote for the Conservative party prefers Stoltenberg as new Prime Minister this autumn. Rather good news if you ask me, all they have to do now is realising that they don’t really want to be voting for neither the Progress or the Conservative party at all! After all the best way to ensure that Stoltenberg do become the new Prime Minister in September is to vote for a party that supports him as the new PM. I am afraid that it will be a close race. All polls this spring seem to indicate that the left-wing coalition has a lead on the right-wing coalition, but if it’ll actually get more than 50% of the votes is still very uncertain. They will certainly need that to be able to change the politics that has been destroying so many aspects of Norwegian life through the last 5 years.

One of my own biggest objections about Bondevik, except from the fact that he is leading a right-wing coalition, is that he is a priest and very religious. I don’t believe in mixing politics and religion, then there will always be some fanatic fundamentalist ending up in power in the end – and that’s sure not good for anyone.

I’ll leave it for another time to tell you all about how this right-wing government has ruined the Norwegian labour law and the civil servant’s law. How they have continuously through the last 5 years done everything they can to make the working conditions harder for the employees: they have made the work day longer and allowed for more use of temporary contracts for employees. They have attacked the current sick leave regulations, wanting to worsen them for the workers – and if it hadn’t been for the fact that both the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) and the left-wing coalition worked against it, they probably would have managed to ruin the pension system as well!

So as election times draws closer, I’d say that any polls that says Stoltenberg will become the new PM this autumn sure makes my day a lot brighter!

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