What do people think about my earlier comment about how the "bourgeois" parties have not fallen for the kind of populist socially conservative rhetoric that rightwing parties in other countries have adopted which tends to turn off urban voters.
If you look at the different parties in Scandinavia it isn't that strange. Both Norway and Denmark have rather large populist parties in the form of Dansk Folkeparti (Denmark) and Fremskrittspartiet. These have sort of monopolised the socially conservative populist vote in the two countries. Their core are often old working class voters that want big government and statism, but not multiculturalism, which is why they have abandoned the left.
Because of this, the more "Bourgeois" parties of the Centre-Right (Like Høyre in Norway) can avoid the sort of populism that turns off their core vote in the middle class.
Sweden is somehow different though, in the respect that they don't have a large party of the populist right.
The problem with that theory is that those voters didn't vote right-wing before, they voted left to a large extent.
The underlying factor is that Scandinavian countries are pretty homogenous and we don't really have much in the way of wedge issues. Politics here is very much class-based.
I know that Gustaf. I live in Scandinavia as well.
But the theory does describe the realignement that has taken place in Scandinavian politics (at least Denmark and Norway); where a large chunk of the old working class vote now belongs to the right.
What I don't understand though is how Fremskritt managed to become so big? I mean here in Sweden we sometimes joke about how dumb Norwegians are suppouse to be... but I refuse to believe that 22% of the population actually buy their crap about if we just get rid of immigrants and use more of our oil money, we can afford to both increase spending and lower taxes.
No offence taken!
But you guessed right. I live in Norway.
To understand Fremskrittspartiet you need to understand the context in which the party grew. For a long time Norway was exactly like Sweden, in the sense that the mainstream parties didn't want to talk about immigration. That was until Fremskrittspartiet made it an issue in the late eighties/early nineties.
Prior to that, FRP had been a somewhat thatcherite bunch, dedicated to cutting taxes and abolishing the welfare state. The party's long time leader, Carl I. Hagen even proposed that one million Chinese workers should be allowed to settle in Norway, to subject the "lazy" Norwegian workers to the discipline of the free market.
But ,to quote Barry Goldwater, they realised that they should "hunt where the ducks are". And immigration, supplementet with petroleum populism proved to be a potent mixture.
They were able to draw upon disgruntled social democratic voters, who felt that Arbeiderpartiet had abandoned them, and voters from the mainstream centre-right that believed that Høyre weren't sufficiently radical enough about taxes.
Today one can say they have been the victims of their own success. The national debate regarding immigrations has changed, perhaps for good. The debate is not whether we should have non-western immigration, but rather how we should curb it to the greatest extent possible.
