Polls open as voters across Norway cast ballots in parliamentary election

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• published: 31 Jul 2015
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STORYLINE: Norwegians went to the polling booths on Monday to vote in an election that will likely see a change of government. At Oslo City Hall voting was slow in the first few hours after ballot boxes opened, and Frank Aarebrot, professor of comparative politics at the University of Bergen, says the outcome has been clear for more than two years. "It's the most unsurprising Norwegian election since the election of 1953," he asserted. Polls opened at 8 a.m. local time (0600 GMT), although many people took the opportunity for early voting, including Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg who cast his ballot in Oslo on Sunday. Despite Norway's strong economy and low unemployment, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's centre-left coalition has been trailing in opinion polls for months. "The excitement will start tomorrow," said Professor Aarebrot, "because it's not very clear what kind of conservative government we will get." He went on to list various permutations of coalition and minority or majority governments that could bring the anti-immigrant Progress Party into government for the first time, as part of a centre-right coalition led by Erna Solberg's Conservative Party, which pledges to cut income taxes and increase the availability of private health care. "We don't know what kind of government we're going to get, and that will be a result of negotiations between these parties," said Aarebrot. The discovery of oil and gas in Norway's waters in the 1960s turned the Scandinavian nation into one of the richest in the world, with a strong welfare system and a high standard of living. The oil helped Norway withstand Europe's financial crisis and has allowed it to create an investment fund for the country's future that is now worth around 750 billion US dollars. This is the first parliamentary election since a 2011 mass murder attack on Oslo and the island of Utoya, when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people. Thirty-three survivors of the massacre on Utoya island, mostly members of the Labour Party youth wing, are seeking national office in the election. Stoltenberg was admired for his calm demeanour after Breivik's 2011 massacre and support for his Labour Party saw a short-lived boost. But last year a report criticising the Norwegian police for a litany of institutional failures before and during the attacks dented his government's prestige. Now it appears right-of-centre and anti-immigrant parties are benefiting from Labour's slump in the polls. "Utoya was detrimental to the result for the Progress Party in the local elections that followed the terrorist attacks" says Frank Aarebrot, speaking outside Norway's parliament building. "Their support was halved from 22 percent to 11. And they are not resurging quite yet. The likely outcome of this election would be something between 13 and 15 percent," he estimated. Voting closes at 9 p.m. local time (1900 GMT) with first results expected in the hours after that. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/b2aacd8b905a9308eedc06d897e4da24 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork