Norway Moves to the Center After Attacks

[Lars77]

Norway's voters Monday increased their support for centrist parties in the first elections since a far-right terrorist killed scores of people in attacks targeting the center-left Labor Party.

Support for the governing Labor party increased 2% to 31.6% in the local elections, making it the largest party in terms of its share of the vote.

The center-right Conservative party was the big winner with its share of the vote rising 8.7% to 28%.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904265504576568271031208828.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


Breiviks favourite party dropped from about 17 to 11% of the vote. These were local elections.
I am glad to see the bastards out of office. The party leaders favourite author is.. You guessed it. Ayn Rand.
This is the party that had the Tea Party over to hold lectures last year.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Of course, in Norway, "centrist" means "way to the left of the Democrats"

:-)

One of my cousins was once elected to the equivalent of a state legislature from a party that she described as "green and red," socialist with an environmental emphasis.

[Lars77]

2. Green-Red what they call the ruling coalition of the Socialist Left, Labor and Agrarian parties :)

[RyanPsych]

3. I'm concerned how a far-right- Ultra conservative-based attack leads to the Conservatives gaining

points...but that may be just my ignorance of Europeans politics...

[Lars77]

4. Officially, the conservatives in Norway are actually the sister party of the US Republican party.

However, their ideology is actually more in line with a leftist Democrat, although it is nearly impossible to compare because the US political system is so skewed to the right compared to ours.

The conservatives here have always been very very weary of the progress party (which are a very rescent phenomenon) and especially their flirting with anti-islamic and anti-immigrant sentiments.

The Norwegian conservative party is a party that has had openly gay people in key positions for years and have clearly distanced themselves from the populist rhetoric of the progress party.

A lot of the voters the conservatives gained in this local election are probably people who feel guilty about how the progress party´s rhetoric might be at fault, but does not want to support the ruling centre-left coalition. I don´t like the conservatives one bit, but in the American political system they would be regarded as far left on most issues.

[saras]

5. It's a strange system, when adopting the values of a psycho killer is "moving towards the center"

[LeftishBrit]

6. I think they're saying the opposite.

That the vote for the far-right party (misleadingly called 'Progress') has gone down, and that for more centrist parties has gone up.

'Conservative' in Norway probably means something like 'Democrat' in America; the Labour Party is significantly to the left of probably *any* elected Democrat in America.