What do such different places as Finnmark, Oppland and the Østfold town of Sarpsborg have in common? One answer is that the Frp has been measured as the largest party in the last week. A year ago this would have been referred to as an earthquake and a sensation. Now it is hardly met with a shrug. The FRP has had a rising form curve all year, and in several individual national polls has overtaken the Conservative Party as the country’s largest party. Power bases in erosion What is most startling about the local surveys is that these are counties and municipalities where the Labor Party has traditionally had a distinctive and strong position. If you met people on the street, the probability was high that they were an Ap voter. If you went further into the town hall, it was even more likely that the municipality or county was governed by an Ap mayor. When news Dagsrevyen last week asked people on the streets in Inlandet who they should vote for, they answered Frp – with great boldness. We are probably not going very far back in time before it was hardly as easy to appear as an FRP voter on TV in prime time in a red-green core area. Now all these AP bastions are about to fall. The Labor Party is clearly in crisis. But even worse for the party is that their voter base is in complete erosion. Because it also says something about which voters are leaving Ap, and who are moving towards Frp in strong streams. These are often people with a traditional working-class background. Who do not have university education or the highest salaries. Many live in medium-sized and small municipalities. In addition, we see that the FRP is doing very well among the young, especially among men. Ordinary people, as some have tried to call them before. Education is perhaps the factor that influences our party choices to the greatest extent. On background figures, we see that the FRP is strongly over-represented among voters with little or no education, and almost absent among voters with the highest education. Another group that the Labor Party can no longer take for granted are voters with an immigrant background. Not only has Ap’s grip on these voters loosened. Now we also see a shift to the right among immigrant voters. Turn everything upside down This tendency is obvious in the American election. There has been a large exchange of voters between the parties. Donald Trump has simply turned the party political landscape upside down. The recipe for electoral victory is that he has got an iron grip on the working class. Voters with low education and thin wallets are increasingly turning against him and the Republican Party. We also saw that Latinos and black voters voted for Trump at a much higher rate. These are voter groups that the Democrats have previously had in the palm of their hand. And as some will claim that “do not know their own best” when they now turn against Trump. The Democrats appear increasingly as a party for the highly educated in the big cities. (U) popularly called the elites. They have almost 100 percent support among Europeans and superstars such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. But it was not enough to win the election. On the contrary, the defeat was much greater for the Democrats than most had predicted. We have seen before that the new people’s party That Ap here at home has lost its grip on its traditional voters. We got a taste through the Center Party’s strong growth, especially in northern Norway. Was SP, a party without strong roots in the north, about to become the new People’s Party? The answer turned out to be no. We saw that in the wild fall after the party came into government. In four years, SP lost almost four out of five voters in our northernmost county. When Sp won 24.1 percent of the voters at the county council election in 2019, they won a lot for Finnmark to be resurrected as a separate county. Now news and Altaposten’s recent survey shows that the FRP would receive support from 24.4 percent of voters if there were a general election today. As a small apropos, the FRP believes that the county municipalities should be closed down. The lesson is that voters have become as loyal as a tinder date. Now most voters are on loan, also in what have been traditional core areas. Voters are less loyal, they jump from party to party, even between parties that are politically and culturally very far apart. It particularly affects the Labor Party, which has had a large base of voters. And all indications are that this will only intensify. Look to Denmark In Denmark, which Norwegian politics tends to emulate, researchers referred to the last election as “a tsunami”. Never before have more voters switched parties (53 per cent), had doubts when the election campaign started (66 per cent) or were more concerned with the qualities of the party leader than with the party itself. Election researchers called it a violent development in democracy, and questioned whether political stability would be challenged. To quote electoral researcher Kasper Møller in Berlingske: “Parties are no longer bastions of ideology – they are brands, drawn up by a party leader. This means that you as a party can lose support very quickly. And that the parties will often be at a loss, because they constantly have to move to capture the voters.” The trend will obviously influence Norwegian politics further. And us who will try to predict and understand how voters move. But that’s exactly the least of the problems. Published 14.11.2024, at 23.42
ttn-69
Political earthquakes are the new normal – Speech
