Norway’s troubled Christian Democrats party finally agreed last week to elect a new leader at an extraordinary national meeting in January. Wounds from an internal power struggle haven’t healed, though, and the party may wind up with a leader who doesn’t want a seat in Parliament.
The infighting and power struggle led to the resignation of Olaug Bollestad as leader of the party (Kristelig Folkeparti, KrF), nearly four months after she’d gone out on sick leave. Now she’s also decided not to run for a seat in Parliament again either. She had accused much younger colleagues (deputy leaders Dag-Inge Ulstein and Ida Lindtveit Røse plus party secretary Ingunn Ulfsten) of launching a coup, which they denied. Then came a complaint against her leadership style from three party workers.
Bollestad finally answered questions during a televised interview on state broadcaster NRK, and stressed that she’d made mistakes while insisting she never froze out others. The complaint, she said, was more tied to her personality: “That I don’t like accepting advice, that I didn’t want to be briefed (on issues), that I have humour swings.” She admitted the past few months have been “tough,” but said she won’t carry a grudge. “I don’t want to be a bitter woman aged 60-plus,” she said.
Now Ulstein has changed his mind about leaving politics and said he’ll stand as a candidate to take over for Bollestad at the meeting in January. He still doesn’t want a seat in Parliament, but that may now be earmarked for Røse after the meeting despite personal problems of her own. She also denied launching any sort of coup against Bollestad.
The once-mighty KrF, though, has fallen so low in public opinion polls that it remains unclear how many if any seats the party will win in next year’s national election. It has held less than 3 percent of the vote in recent polls and been accused of failing to keep up with the times. Membership currently stands at just around 27,000, mostly in the southern counties of Agder and Rogaland, Norway’s so-called “Bible Belt.” One member who served as a political adviser in a former Conservatives-KrF government, Svein Konstali, wrote in newspaper Aftenposten this week that “in the 1930s, you could ‘Jesus!’ and voters would come, but it’s not like that today. While society has changed, KrF’s elite has been asleep at the wheel.”
Even though Norwegian values have changed and a new conservative wave is washing over the country, KrF isn’t part of it. KrF could play an important role in forming a politically conservative majority in Parliament, but can’t contribute much at present.
“Market-wise, the party needs a combination of a leader and a seller,” Konstali wrote, “a new Moses who can lead KrF through the desert and into the promised land.” He thinks the party members should be allowed to vote directly for a new leader, not “indirectly through the party’s aristocracy.” He also doesn’t think deputy leaders Ulstein and Røse should win the party’s confidence after all the drama within their own leadership.
NewsinEnglish.no staff
