The Great Nordic Thread

[HansOslo]

Yes, its clearly a party that's unable to fill the space offered to it by a left socialist "big brother" forced to be pragmatic as a junior partner in a Labour/Centrist coalition. If you compare it to the similar Danish situation where Enhedslisten/the Red-Green Alliance has been highly successful in attracting disappointed left wingers from the SPP (and SD) the difference is striking.

As I understand it Rødt is more dogmatic than Enhedslisten. Any other reasons why they have failed?

My impression is that the leadership of the party is filled with people still living in the 1970s.

It’s really extraordinary how they have failed to capitalize on the travails of SV. SV have been forced to take part in a lot of decisions that are unpopular with the party’s base, on issues from taxation to immigration and the environment. And yet Rødt has failed utterly to pick up disaffected SV-voters. 

[HansOslo]

That confirms my impression of Rødt.

Welcome to the forum! Its good to see another Norwegian. We now have 2 Norwegians, 2-3 Finns and 5 Danes among our regular or semi-regular posters, so it should be possible to keep this thread going with regular updates.
 

Thank you. As you probably know we have a general election coming up i Norway this fall, so there should be plenty to discuss.

[HansOslo]

Yeah, we already have a thread about the election under International elections.

I will look that up!

[HansOslo]

It’s interesting how different the Danish party system is from the Norwegian, given how similar our countries are. It seems like your Danske Venstre (The Liberals) are a combination of our main conservative party (Høyre), the agrarian party (Senterpartiet), the liberals (Venstre) and our Christian Democrats (Kristelig Folkeparti). What I don’t understand is your Conservative party (Konservativt Folkeparti). Where do they fit in? And why is your conservative party doing so poorly compared to their equivalents in Norway and Sweden?

The Danish left is of course also a whole lot different. The Norwegian Social Democrats (Arbeiderpartiet) have been successful because they have constantly branched out to new groups of voters. In the beginning they made an effort to expand their base from blue collar manual workers to include farmers and people employed in the fishing industry. As their traditional base of voters declined in the decades after the Second World War, they made an effort to include white collar workers (especially in the public sector) into their coalition. And during the last few decades they have become the main party for immigrants (at least the non-western ones). So I guess my question is, why haven’t the Danish Social Democrats been able to do this?

[HansOslo]

Perhaps the best thing simply would be for the party to simply merge with the Liberals? I can understand why they exist, in a historical context, as the culturally urban alternative to the Liberals. But now that the Liberals (as I understand) is just as much as a urban party, and caters to a lot of the same voters, it just doesn’t make any sense to have a 4 -5% party like the Danish Conservatives. I am not familiar enough with Danish politics, but isn’t the Liberals enough of a big tent party to absorb the Conservatives?

[HansOslo]

The Left Alliance has a nice grown especially because of the fact that the leader of the party was  the one to demand for the re-evaluation of dividend taxation.

What sort of system does Finland have in place regarding taxation of dividends, and what do the Left Alliance propose?

[HansOslo]

First of all, party leader Siv Jensen has launched a strong attack on The Norwegian Model.  She claims that it is not fit for our time, and should be replaced by a new model - called the Frp model, fittingly. She has been criticized for this, even by the other Bourgeois parties. Unfortunately, it seems that she has little idea what the concept of a "Norwegian model" actually entails.

To be honest, it is sort of an open question what the Norwegian (or Nordic) model actually entails.

As of now it seems like the debate mostly centers on which party that should be given credit for creating the Norwegian model.