As has been witnessed recently across other Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland, Norway’s political landscape also appears to be shifting to the Right, figures from a new opinion poll have revealed.
The opinion poll, published by the Norwegian online news outlet Nettavisen, has indicated that, if elections were held today, Norway’s three center-Right parties would collectively garner 46.4% of the national vote, well over the relatively dismal 26.5% that the ruling coalition—comprised the left-liberal Labor Party and the agrarian Center Party—would receive.
The Labor Party, the senior partner in Norway’s ruling coalition, has seen its popular support decline noticeably over the past year or so. Between the late fall of 2021 and January of this year, support for the governing left-wing party has fallen from nearly 26.7% to 20.5%. The Labor Party’s junior coalition party, the Center Party, has fared even more poorly, with its support declining from over 13% to a mere 6% in the same time period.
Meanwhile, support for the Conservative Party, Norway’s primary center-Right opposition party, has climbed from just above 20% in the fall of 2021 up to nearly 30% at the beginning of this year. Last month, the party saw its support level reach nearly 33%. Support for the national-conservative Progress Party has increased moderately, up to 13.1% from 11.6%, while the Christian Democratic Party has seen a small uptick in their popularity, which now stands at just above 4%.
Earlier this month, polling data out of Finland revealed a similar trend, indicating that the popularity of both the national-conservative Finns Party (PS) and the center-Right National Coalition Party (Kok) has exceeded that which is presently enjoyed by Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s left-liberal Social Democratic Party, as The European Conservative reported.
And in Sweden, as most are aware of at this point, a tectonic shift to the Right has already taken place, as the Social Democratic Party, after leading the country continually for many decades, finally fell to a center-Right coalition in last September’s national election. Working and middle-class voters abandoning the Social Democrats for the national-conservative Sweden Democrats party played a crucial role in allowing this shift to take place.
