Siv Jensen: Creating a New Wave in Scandinavian Politics

BY BRUCE BAWER

These days nearly every Western European country has at least one of them - a large political party that's held at arm's length by the media, political establishment, professoriate and chattering classes. Some of these black sheep - such as the BNP, Le Pen's National Front, and the late Jörg Haider's crew in Austria - really are beyond the pale; others are demonised simply because they challenge statist dogma and/or speak forbidden truths about Islamic immigration.

Here in Scandinavia, the home of statism at its statiest, the most high-profile such entity is probably Pia Kjærsgaard's Danish People's Party. Two months after 9/11, voter anxiety about Islamisation swept out the Social Democrats (in power since 1924) and installed a conservative coalition - which, with strong DPP support, has since instituted effective, and popular, reforms (and stood foursquare for free speech during the cartoon crisis). The picture in Sweden is different: although the 2006 election exchanged Göran Persson's long-dominant Social Democrats for a "moderate" coalition, systemic changes have been modest, and the only major critics of the Swedes' essentially unmodified "see-no-evil" immigration policy have been the Sweden Democrats - a group, alas, that has a history of neo-Nazi ties and anti-Semitic rhetoric (and, in any case, has yet to win a single Riksdag seat).

Somewhere in between lies Norway, whose major anti-establishment faction is the Progress Party, or Fremskrittspartiet (FrP for short). Founded in 1973, it was run for 28 years by the charismatic Carl I. Hagen, whose tough-talking pugnacity made him a standout, in the '80s and '90s, in a largely bland political firmament. Though nothing in the party's programme would raise eyebrows in, say, moderate Republican circles in the US, its rejection of longstanding Nordic assumptions about the role of the state has long led the media to caricature its ideology as dangerous, its supporters as unevolved lowbrows, and Hagen as a demagogue. Yet FrP survived - and thrived. Though other parties (of Left and Right) have collaborated to deny its MPs top government positions, FrP now not only dwarfs the once-powerful Conservatives but also rivals Labour, that mighty architect of postwar Norway's huge state bureaucracy and welfare system. FrP, it's widely assumed, will garner enough votes in next September's parliamentary elections to form a government.

Such an outcome would be a triumph for both market liberalism and common sense about immigration - and a massive blow for that once seemingly indomitable colossus, Scandinavian social democracy. Yet the victory's public face won't be Hagen, who retired in 2006, but his longtime second-in-command, Siv Jensen. In one sense, Jensen, 39, fits neatly into the current crop of Norwegian party heads: like her, the Conservatives' Erna Solberg and the Socialist Left's Kristin Halvorsen are formidable blonde pitbulls born in the 1960s. But the Thatcher-like brio with which Jensen defies PC pieties sets her apart. A shrewd, compelling debater, she's unyielding on core principles, but nonetheless cuts a more congenial figure than her sometimes blustering predecessor. Indeed, her wry humour seems actually to have tempered media hostility towards FrP.

Tempered, but not quelled. Last year, sophisticates cheered a book, FrP-Koden (The Progress Party Code), in which Magnus Marsdal, a veteran of such Communist institutions as Attac, Red Youth and the newspaper Klassekampen, puzzled over the rise of "Norway's most unsympathetic party". Yet ordinary Norwegians can see clearly why FrP has risen like a phoenix: its warnings about unchecked social democracy and naïve immigration policies have proven all too prescient, and for many Norwegians Jensen and her party represent the only hope for meaningful change. If she wins power, she may yet provide a model of gutsy liberalism and immigration common sense for all of Europe.