What is happening in Norway? The country is completely
off the EU radar.
The country has now grown the western world’s largest
anti-immigration party when no one has been looking,
that is what.
Commentators insist though that Carl Hagen’s
Fremmskrittspartiet, or Progress Party, isn’t another
European far right party, a label it rejects. It calls
itself populist.
How has it managed to secure a 34 percent support in
the latest polls, in early April, making it the
largest party in the country - and three-and-a-half
times bigger than any other opposition party?
Fewer foreigners please
For a start it wants to cut taxes as well as boost
spending. Norway has a huge amount of money from its
oil income stashed away - 200bn euros, described as
the world’s largest pension fund. The leftwing
coalition government, led by Jens Stoltenberg, says it
cannot spend this money now, since it would send
inflation soaring. Anyway the cash is needed for
leaner times, when the oil runs out.
But Hagen wants to spend the money now, on schools,
hospitals and old people’s social services. A second
reason is that he wants to limit non-western
immigration to a thousand people a year - Britain
receives 1,500 people a day. Both these - possibly
unrealistic - policies appeal to an extraordinarily
loyal and often elderly cadre of voters and helped the
dapper 62-year-old into second place in the elections
last autumn. But now the Muslim cartoons crisis has
put further wind in the party’s sails.
Wrecked embassies, wrecked reputations
Because the country is next door to Denmark, and
because a Norwegian magazine was the first in the West
to republish all 12 cartoons, in January, its Damascus
embassy, along with Denmark’s, was torched in the
protest riots three months ago. Norwegian citizens
were evacuated from Syria.
As Scandinavian products were boycotted across the
Muslim world, an Anholt national brand survey, in
which panels from dozens of countries evaluate each
nation’s image, showed that Denmark fell from a
respectable position in Egypt to bottom of the table -
far below the US. Eighty percent of Egyptians did not
agree with the statement that Danes are honest.
Norway’s results were only a little better. In other
Muslim countries the results were similar. The report
noted: “This is quite significant. People’s views of
other countries are generally quite fixed and stable,
and it takes something very serious indeed to make
them revise their views. Above all, it takes something
personal.”
“The best person is he who repents”
Damage limitation was called for - or so thought the
government.
After the fires, it moved into conciliation mode.
Velbjørn Selbekk, the editor of the tiny Christian
periodical Magazinet, who had firmly resisted pressure
by Muslim extremists and the Norwegian establishment
to retract, was cajoled into a joint press conference
at a major government building by Norway’s minister of
employment. As Selbekk apologised, flanking him was
Mohammed Hamdan, head of the Islamic council of
Norway, who accepted his contrition on behalf of 46
Muslim organisations. Hamdan said:
“You are now under our protection. The prophet
Muhammed says everyone makes mistakes, but the best
person is he who repents.”
Then, the Norwegian government sponsored a team
comprising representatives for the Islamic council of
Norway and from the Lutheran church in Oslo to tour
the Gulf on a peacemaking mission. One of the people
they visited in Qatar was top Muslim leader Dr Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, who has reportedly supported suicide
bombings, and has publicly bragged about how “Islam
will conquer Europe”. The “moderate” al-Qaradawi was
apparently not entirely satisfied with Selbekk’s
apology and told his visitors that Norway ought to
introduce Islamic blasphemy laws. "Freedom of
expression is all about expressing an opinion. In the
cartoons case, there is no opinion or
counter-opinion," he told Islam Online.
“Freedom is Norway’s fundamental value”
Back in Oslo, mainstream media were careful to be
inclusive, but hyperactive blogs said Selbekk’s
humiliating apology to the Muslim leader in return for
pardon and protection was reminiscent of the state of
dhimmitude - the submission of non Muslims living in
Muslim societies to Sharia law. According to the
website Dhimmiwatch, Dhimmis, "protected people", are
free to practise their religion in a Sharia regime,
but are made subject to a number of humiliating
regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command
that they "feel themselves subdued".
While opposition politicians were cautious about
criticising all this, Hagen differed; he made a clear
demarcation in favour of the right to publish. Whether
it was accompanied by the dog whistle sounds of racism
- the country has a 6 percent immigrant population -
was for his listeners to decide. “Many Imans come from
countries where freedom of speech is not a
reality...They are trying it tear down our defences
that protect freedom of speech. When they have done
this, they will always be saying: ‘Now you must
respect this.’
“The Progress Party is going to stand up for freedom
of speech as a fundamental value. The government
should not be behaving as if its regrets the fact we
have freedom of speech in Norway,” he told
Aftenposten.
In polls, the party’s popularity rose by about eight
percentage points between January and April,
overtaking Labour, the largest party in the coalition.
It now has three supporters for every two it had at
the election.
“Dialogue is not appeasement”
So what next? Hagen has always wanted to be prime
minister, but in 27 years as party leader he has
always been locked out of the mainstream, like Vlaams
Blok. (Which he distances himself from).
For him it is too late, since he is stepping down
later this year in favour of the feisty Siv Jensen;
the next election is in 2009.
There are signs the country’s establishment are taking
the party more seriously, as it tries to sanitise
parts of its manifesto, and its best hope for the top
post - unless it grows further - is probably coalition
support from the now heavily depleted Conservatives -
the right’s traditional ruling party - who are
prepared to break the cordon sanitaire imposed by the
other parties.
Things would not be easy for this new alliance as the
party, which originally grew out of a protest movement
against Scandinavian high taxes and political
conformism would have to divest itself of the
indulgent habits of perpetual opposition: Nineteen out
of 20 economic experts recently said the party’s
economic policy didn’t add up. And its integration
policy? Aftenposten - the voice of liberal Norway -
has, despite not agreeing with everything about
government’s softsoaping of the Muslim community,
repeatedly warned against going down the hardline
Danish route on integration; Harvard Narum, a
political commentator, wrote: “The Progress Party has
clearly chosen to equate dialogue with appeasement.
This does not bode well for the important integration
and immigration debate in the time ahead.”
So Stoltenberg will be torn if he takes on the
Progress Party’s populist agenda. But there are
clearly votes to be won from the pressures many
Norwegians feel their small country is subjected to
from the Muslim community abroad and at home.
