Oslo, September 14 (HNA) – In the parliamentary elections held yesterday in Norway, the “centre-left bloc” parties put an end to the eight-year-long right-wing coalition government, after a campaign dominated by climate change and the future of the country’s oil and gas exploration industry.
With a projection based on a preliminary count of nearly 52 percent of the vote, the Labor Party and its two allies — the Socialist Left and the eurosceptic Center Party — appear to have won 88 of the Stortinget assembly’s 169 seats, according to the Norwegian election commission. A majority in the parliament is at 85 seats.
Norwegian Workers’ Party leader Jonas Gahr Støre, who is preparing to become Norway’s 36th Prime Minister, addressed his supporters and said, “We waited, we hoped and we worked hard. And now we can finally say we did it. Everything shows that we have achieved the goal of government change. Our parties, who say we want a new government and a new route for the country, seem to have succeeded. Last winter we were behind 20 percent in the opinion polls. I am proud that we managed to stand up. “Today we celebrate a change,” he said.
The vote came at the end of a tumultuous summer in Europe, marked by scorching temperatures and flooding in many countries. Once a distant prospect for many Norwegians, global warming became a more tangible reality that all political parties in the wealthy Nordic nation of 5.3 million could no longer ignore.
Though smaller Norwegian parties with the most aggressive stance toward fossil fuels fared less well than expected Monday, the vote offered evidence that the climate issue may be shifting the balance of power to the left in some European countries, among them Germany, which is holding its own election in just two weeks. The Social Democratic candidate there has been leading in the polls, and the Green candidate is ranking third.
In Norway, the Labour Party, led by former Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, won around 26 percent of the votes in the country’s parliamentary elections and was poised to form a coalition with the Center Party. But he may also have to include a smaller left-wing party that has demanded a more aggressive response to tackle climate change, and that could make any coalition deeply divided over fossil fuels and taxes.