Solberg is now the longest-serving prime ministerHøyre has produced in its history. Despite her lengthy tenure, she has remained fairly popular with Norwegians, even though her party has recently faltered in opinion polls. Solberg is certainly better-liked when compared to the Norwegian Labour Party leader, Jonas GahrStøre.

The main challenge to Høyre’s grip on power will come from Labour (Arbeiderpartiet or Ap for short). Labour used to be the dominant force in Norwegian politics, holding office more than a dozen times between 1945 and 2013, usually in the form of a single-party government. Now, however, its only plausible route to power lies through a coalition deal.

The main partners available to Labour on the left of Norway’s political spectrum are the Socialist Left Party (SV), the Greens (MDG), and the hard-left Red Party (Rødt). The Centre Party (Senterpartiet or Sp) should be in a position to act as kingmaker, having already served in government with Ap and SV from 2005 to 2013.

In line with the experience of other social-democratic parties in Europe, Ap has increasingly found itself supported by middle-class professionals rather than its traditional working-class electorate. In the process, it has become more and more alienated from what had been its popular base, whether in Norway’s industrial districts or in rural areas.

After a poor showing in the 2001 election, when its support fell below 30 percent for the first time since the 1920s, Labour embarked on a new political course as a party of coalition, resulting in the Ap-led red-green alliance of 2005–2013. The Labour leadership had initially wanted to work with more centrist parties, but it was the Norwegian trade union federation LO that worked hard to bring the Socialist Left into the fold, seeing SV’s participation as a guarantee that Labour would not shift too far to the right.

Since the 1990s, Ap’s political orientation has been to be more pro-market and pro-EU. Jens Stoltenberg, Ap leader from 2002 to 2014, even supported greater privatization of Norway’s public health care system, in stark contrast to LO’s position.

The party has recently been hit by a sexual harassment scandal involving its local branch leader in Trondheim, where support for Labour is especially strong. TrondGiske was previously considered a sure candidate for the national party’s number two position. The Giske affair has shone an unflattering light on the party’s internal culture in a city that had been one of its showcases under long-serving Ap mayor Rita Ottervik. As the newspaper Morgenbladet reported last year, the party’s opponents were “jealous of the cleverness and team-building abilities of the Ap politicians in the city. They appeared strong on the outside and united on the inside.”

Instead of capitalizing on the Solberg coalition’s shortcomings, Ap has struggled to cut through. As one Norwegian commentator wrote after the 2013 election results:“Maybe Ap lost the election because a few too many voters felt that they had lost the party.”

Ap’s current leader, Jonas Gahr Støre, in the post since 2014, has done nothing to turn things around. Gahr Støre, who comes from a very wealthy background, has consistently polled badly with voters and is a poor fit for the challenges Ap is facing. While his fellow citizens may be able to see him reading the union-backed left-wing daily Klassekampen (“The Class Struggle”) when he takes the morning metro into Oslo’s city center, this is an obvious piece of theater, obligatory for any Labour leader, and doesn’t reflect any strong ideological commitment on his part.

From outside the ranks of the Ap itself, the Norwegian left-wing thinker Mímir Kristjánsson has sought to provide some remedies for its current malaise with his book Martin Tranmæls Metode. Born in 1986, Kristjánsson is a member of the city council in Stavanger on Norway’s west coast for the Rødt party and a well-known figure in Norwegian left-wing circles. Formerly the leader of Rødt’s youth wing, he has also worked for the left-wing journal Manifest and as a journalist for Klassekampen.

Kristjánsson has combined his activism and journalism with the authorship of seven books, including a novel and a memoir of his experience growing up with a mother who was afflicted with cancer and disability, Mamma erTrygda. Published in 2019, Mamma erTrygda is Kristjánsson’s best-known work. A blend of family history and political commentary, it showed that for Kristjánsson, the politics of Norway’s social-democratic state were a tangible reality that had to be fought for.

In Tranmæls Metode, published last year, Kristjánsson takes a different approach. The book offers a potted history of the career of Martin Tranmæl, a giant of the Norwegian labor movement. Tranmæl, who served as editor of Ap’s main daily newspaper and as a member of the party’s central committee from the 1920s to the 1940s, played a fundamental role in shaping the Norwegian left during those years.

Kristjánsson’s book shows how Tranmæl, the son of a farmer who worked himself as a painter-decorator, managed to bridge the gap between Norway’s seemingly irreconcilable urban and rural communities, in the face of a rising fascist tendency represented by Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling movement. In Kristjánsson’s account, the Ap of Tranmæl summed up this approach with the slogan “by og land / hand i hand” (“city and country hand in hand”), promising work for the entire country.

SV, Labour’s traditional challenger on its left flank, has now adopted as its slogan “for det mange ikke for detfå,” a direct transliteration of the British Labour Party’s “for the many, not the few.” Having been founded in the 1970s, SV’s best performance to date was in the 2001 election, when it won 12.5 percent of the vote; in 2017, it won half that share. SV retains its own identity on the Norwegian left, with a strong emphasis on combining socialist and ecological policies, stressing the need for Norway to develop its own version of the Green New Deal.

The UN Human Development Index regularly places Norway in its top position. However, last year’s HDI report took account for the first time of a country’s impact on “planetary pressures.” Although Norway still ranked first for “a long and healthy life, knowledge, and a decent standard of living,” when the index included its carbon footprint in the calculus, it dropped to sixteenth place, reflecting Norway’s heavy involvement in North Sea oil and gas production.

As things stand, Ap still has the potential to form a ruling alliance with the Centre Party and SV, most likely with support from the Norwegian Green Party. The Greens are reluctant to sign up to a block with the left parties in advance of the election but have said they would willingly join them in forming a government afterward. Meanwhile, Rødt, led by their only MP Bjørnar Moxnes, insist that they will vote with a left-aligned government but will not join that government themselves.

However, if the various parties of the Left fall short of the numbers needed for a viable coalition, another four years of Høyre-led government would mark a decisive break with the post-war consensus in Norway — a consensus that was the ultimate fruit of Martin Tranmæl’s political method. (IPA Service)