Under the headline ‘Norway didn’t give into Islamophobia, nor should France’, Owen Jones writes on the Guardian’s Comment is free website that Norway’s response to the Anders Breivik massacre in 2011 ‘was not retribution, revenge, clampdowns’, and that ‘the backlash [Breivik] surely craved never came’.
Norway, he writes, ‘stood strong’. But did it really? I’m half Norwegian. I adore the country, and I would – and do – fight its corner any day of the week (even against our Swede-loving editor). Norway certainly hasn’t given in to Islamophobia, but it has reacted. No matter what Owen Jones says, there have been some changes in the Norwegian public’s general attitudes.
In October 2013, two years after Breivik’s killing spree, Erna Solberg was voted in as the country’s new Prime Minister. Her predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, was the leader of the Norwegian Arbeiderpartiet (labour party), which embraced centre-left, social democratic values. Solberg, on the other hand, fronts the Høyre (literally, right) party, which governs in a coalition with ‘Fremskrittspartiet’; the progress party. Although far from being the equivalent of some far-right parties that are growing in popularity across Europe, it does still call for stricter immigration policies. In fact, Breivik was once a member of their youth branch, but left because he reportedly found their views too moderate.
However centre right the current Norwegian government may be, it’s certainly further right than Stoltenberg’s. Of course, Norway’s reaction to the tragedy is nowhere near the same as, say, France responding to the latest ongoing saga by electing Marine Le Pen into government. But it’s certainly a reaction or, you could say, a backlash of sorts.
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