Ready to abolish the Sami Parliament
photo: nrk.no
The Norwegian Progress Party (FrP) are better placed than ever to win the Parliamentary elections this year. They currently count around a third of Norwegian voters, and although they cannot yet maintain power alone, their plans to partner with Høyre (the Right-wing party) to gain majority are enough to frighten those to the left of, say, Thatcher.
FrP views Sami culture and way of life as part and parcel of threatening sub-cultures in Norway, and has included the abolishment of the Sami Parliament into their party program. Thorvald Aspenes, a local representative for FrP, recently likened the Sami President Egil Olli to Adolf Hitler, and calls for Samis to be moved out of Norway if they do not want to assimilate. Pål Hivand accurately points out that once ‘hitling’ is used in debates, the end station of serious debate has been reached. He explains that hitling is a tool used to discredit the opponent by likening their values to those of Hitler and the Holocaust.
To compare an oppressed minority group to the perpetrator of industrial mass murder shows the complete disqualification of rational argument. But such are the tools of this, and other, far right-wing parties such as FrP -look to Australia’s One Nation. They use accusations, fear and sentimental arguments in successful ways to influence susceptible voters.
The fight against anything that looks, feels or thinks different.. this sounds frighteningly like fascism.
FrP is a right-wing populist party with Christian and nationalistic ideals, and has been advancing steadily the past decade, mainly by advocating single causes such as tax cuts, lowering petrol prices, limiting State powers, limiting immigration, strengthening assimilation, and emphasising personal freedoms, while wanting to improve the public hospital system, school system and aged care facilities. How the party is going to fund their program is a mystery, nor do they seem to be learning the lessons of the global financial crisis, but that seems not to be the point.
Norwegians want change. Sweden elected their right-wing parliament in 2006. The Democrats had then held power for all but nine of the years since 1932. In Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen and his right-wing coallition were re-elected in 2007. It appears the socialist foundations of Scandinavia are shaking, and getting into line with increasingly racist tendencies in the rest of Europe. Feeding fear of Islamification as a threat to Norwegian values is being used as fuel for the FrP campaign. But is this tendency also a sign that the old socialist state institutions are getting old and stiff and unable to provide solutions for those who feel marginalised? Or are they simply getting very good at fear-mongering?
