The Revolution Council

Although having achieved the goal of obtaining the sufficient number of parliamentary seats to establish a majority government coalition consisting of Labour (Ap), the Center party (Sp) and the Socialist Left (SV), the latter doesn't seem too enthused with the election results. Even though the Socialist Left for the first time in history have an opportunity to move into the government offices, the party's support was diminished considerably at the polls. The party lost 8 of their 23 parliamentary seats and got only 8,8% of the votes, reversing a good trend from the last parliamentary elections (12,5% in 2001) and the last local elections (13,0% in 2003). The setback is even greater recalling that they scored around 17-18% in summer's opinion polls.

Being a radical protest party (erstwhile the opposition to Norwegian membership in NATO triggered the leftist wing of Labour to break out and establish their own party in the 1960s), there's been plenty of murmuring on the party's member and activist level recently. The party leadership's pragmatic approach to the red-green coalition project has been followed with great scepticism, but internal criticism has mostly been muted. So far.

Given the party's election setback, party activists are convinced that they lost because the party leaders were soft on important policy issues. Consequently, there's been established a group of radicals to which the party leadership will have to report frequently during the coalition negotiations with Labour and the Center party. The group is thus supposed to make sure that the Socialist Left will retain their radical prophile. And it sure will, stacked as it is by staunch leftist radicals. Such as Hallgeir Langeland, the long-haired anti-Americanist who each year proposes Fidel Castro to Nobel's Peace Prize, and who deemed Iraqis being trained in Norway at the Nato base in Stavanger (on the request of the UN) as quislings.

Ironically, then, there seems to be certain similarities between the secular Norwegian socialists and the shia government of Iran: Both are anti-American. Both have a revolution council who monitors and vetoes the actions of the executive. And: Both are fundamentalist, secular and muslim respectively.

Unfortunately, media coverage is only in Norwegian. Scandinavian readers, though, may find interesting articles here, here and here.