Oslo, Norway – As much of Europe struggles against economic stagnation and unemployment, Norway is flush with oil, cash and good jobs. The stock market has tripled since early 2003, and interest rates have hit record lows.
But with a national election today, Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik is straining against a unified left in Norway’s nine-party field.
The central issue – as usual in Scandinavia – is social welfare spending. In four years, Bondevik’s center-right government has modestly increased such spending while restructuring the military, rebuffing unwarranted asylum seekers and cutting nearly everyone’s tax bill.
Many Norwegians now say they want to focus more aggressively on expanding what is already one of the world’s most extensive social-service networks.
“We should use our money on welfare and schools and care for the elderly instead of tax relief,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former Labor Party prime minister campaigning to win his old job back, said recently in a debate on state television. He has vowed to undo tax cuts “for the rich” that were enacted last year and to put social and job-security issues at the fore.
For several months, opinion polls have suggested that left- leaning parties would win a clear majority of Norway’s 169 parliamentary seats. However, a poll for TV2, a commercial station, on Friday found a slight lead for Bondevik, 58, and his “nonsocialist” bloc.
The opposition leader since 2001, Stoltenberg, 46, has moved away from the business-friendly centrism that Labor espoused in the 1980s and 1990s.
He renewed his embrace of the trade-union confederation, which wants to shorten workdays to six hours, and joined forces with the once-fringe Socialist Left Party, which seeks expanded state control and financing of day care, education and health services.
In its official platform, the Socialist Left calls the United States “the greatest threat to peace in the world.” Conservative Party leader Erna Solberg has called the newly consolidated left a “red danger” that could sap Norwegian economic competitiveness and isolate the country internationally.
In the televised debate, Bondevik said a Stoltenberg-led government would also cloud the future of Norway’s offshore petroleum industry. While Stoltenberg supports drilling in the Barents Sea, his partners in the Socialist Left are fiercely opposed on environmental grounds.
In every year of his term, Bondevik noted, the U.N. Development Program has ranked Norway as the world’s best country in which to live.
“These have been four good years for Norway,” Bondevik said, apparently surprised that some wished to change course. But the Labor Party has dominated politics here since World War II and remains the default choice for many Norwegians.