It’s been eight months since Ine (pronounced “Eee-nah”) Eriksen Søreide took over as leader of what’s long been one of Norway’s major political parties. Now her Conservative Party (Høyre) is said to be “in crisis” after a string of dismal public opinion polls, but Søreide claims to have a revival plan.
The latest polls are terrible for Norway’s once-mighty Conservatives, who most recently held government power for two terms from 2013 to 2021 and pretty much hung on to more than 20 percent of the vote. Polls released last week, though, showed them down as low as 12.8 percent, while another wasn’t much better, at just 14.4 percent.
When Søreide took over as Conservatives leader in February, poll numbers had already fallen to around 18 percent. Now the party is a shadow of its former self, an “unclear and even invisible alternative” to either the Labour Party now in power or Norway’s other parties on the conservative side, claims political commentator Frithjof Jacobsen in newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN). He believes the party “is in crisis,” and that “Søreide has had a miserable start as party leader.”
It’s ironic, since she had overwhelming support and no opposition within the Conservatives when she took over after long-term leader Erna Solberg. Jacobsen is among those claiming that Solberg sat too long, failed to take rival parties seriously and “tipped over into the arrogance of power.” Søreide is anything but arrogant, yet now suffers from a voter exodus.
She keeps smiling, though, and remains steadfast in her program and principles. She refuses to resort to what some call the “economic populism” of Norway’s most right-wing party in Parliament, Progress, and its recently re-styled leader Sylvi Listhaug.
Instead of getting any sort of cosmetic makeover or new hairstyles, Søreide stuck to her casual yet professional manner and set off on a tour around the country to listen to voters’ concerns. Critics claim she missed opportunities to launch a new party profile or new poilitical programs.
One major challenge remains Russia’s war on Ukraine and how that continues to make security and defense the most important issues. Søreide is a former defense- and foreign minister, and there’s widespread agreement over how Labour Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre’s government is dealing with the war, making it more difficult to find other major issues of disagreement. The rival Progress Party has opted to focus on pocketbook issues, and rev up voter unrest over high fuel prices, the rising cost of living and taxes.
That’s paid off for Søreide’s opposition, with polls showing how Progress (which called itself a “junior partner” in Solberg’s conservative coalition governments) has snared more than 50,000 voters away from the Conservatives. Progress was already twice as big as the Conservative Party by June, when it claimed 31.5 percent in a poll by research firm Respons for newspaper Aftenposten. That compared to 16.8 for the Conservatives at the time.
The Progress Party’s success in the polls has emboldened its leader Listhaug to claim that voters are calling for “a new course,” suggesting she’s the new queen on the conservative side of Norwegian politics. That’s a far cry from the headlines just a year ago, when one in Dagens Næringsliv that claimed “Everyone loves Ine.”
Søreide is starting to fight back, unveiling her own plan this week to restore the Conservatives as “the recognizable and classic Høyre,” a party committed to common-sense projects. She cited a need to get more people into the workforce, to “renew the public sector” and to emphasize reading, writing and arithmetic in the schools.
She’s promising “clearer policies” after summing up all she learned while traveling around the country and listening to the locals’ concerns. While the current Labour government “wants to protect the state’s money,” she claims, citizens and businesses “can use their own money best themselves.”
That still sounds much like what Listhaug has long claimed, that “folks should be able to keep more of their own money,” but the Conservatives claim a “clear difference between themselves and Jonas Gahr Støre” regarding how Norway should develop further. The Conservatives, Søreide claims, “think Norway is built on individuals’ creativity, knowledge, efforts and willingness to take risks, not on its natural resources alone.”
Søreide criticized Støre for promoting “more state, more bureaucracy and higher taxes,” while her party wants to “modernize, simplify and renew the state.” She thinks Norway is “over-administrated, and we need to improve management of the public sector. We can regulate less and achieve more than we do now.”
Like other opposition parties, Søreide also wants to do away with Norway’s annual and highly controversial tax on net worth for both individuals and businesses, called formueskatt (fortune tax). “We have sharpened our standpoint on that, and are now clear that the entire tax must be removed,” she says. Labour wants to maintain it, in its effort to even out social diffences, even though many of the wealthy Norwegians who paid much of it have since emigrated to Switzerland to avoid it.
The Conservative Party itself was calling on its website this week for “more money in your own pockets, more teaching in the schools, more choice and higher quality of elder care and lower taxes for individuals and companies.” The state budget battle in Parliament is already underway.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund