The Conservative Party and the Labor Party gained in Norway’s municipal elections, as voters shunned the anti-immigration Progress Party after a shortened campaign in the aftermath of the July 22 terror attacks.
The Conservatives got 27.6 percent of the votes nationwide yesterday, up from 19.3 percent in local elections in 2007, according to a count of 70 percent of the votes by the Oslo- based Local Government and Regional Development Ministry. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s Labor, which leads a ruling national coalition, received 32.1 percent, up from 29.6 percent in 2007. The Progress Party fell to 11.2 percent from 17.5 percent.
Campaigning was delayed for two weeks after Anders Behring Breivik bombed the premier’s office and shot 69 people at a Labor Party youth camp near Oslo, which the 32-year-old former Progress Party member said was done to inflict the “greatest possible loss” to Labor. It wasn’t immediately clear if the Conservative-Progress coalition would retain power in the Norwegian capital.
“It seems like the Progress Party is suffering because of what happened on July 22,” Johannes Bergh, a political scientist at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo, said before the results. “The fact that you can’t talk about immigration now, the way that they did before the terror attacks, is something that is a problem for the Progress Party.”
The local election, which covers 429 municipalities, has no effect on representatives in parliament or the basis for the government. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2013.
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