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Key of Return

Event series x Palestine


13/08/2025

Key of Return is a grassroots event series for Palestine, brought together by fourteen Gazzawi artists, six non-Gazzawi artists, a few cultural organisers and curators, and countless helping hands. At heart, we are a decentralised collective of friends—working like the tentacles of an octopus: each part working independently and engaged with their local communities, yet all connected by a shared core.

We organise events to raise funds for artists and their families in Gaza, but also to build community, to grieve death, and to celebrate life. We are united in our commitment to liberation from all forms of oppression, and we fiercely condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Refusing immobility, we organise through the strength of community, believing that art is a powerful tool of resistance, memory, identity, and solidarity. We aim to amplify voices that are silenced and, through art, claim existence and shared humanhood.

Our exhibition:

In ‘Ayda Refugee Camp, just outside Bethlehem, every single resident has been exposed to tear gas bombs, often multiple times a week, making it the most tear-gassed community ever documented. In order to get there, you must drive along the separation wall, where breaths are skipped as petrol burns.

One more turn and there you are–the place where Akram Wa’ra and his family greet you: This is my wife, these are my kids, my niece who is visiting. Warm hellos and cheerful thank‑yous before the most delicious feast enters your mouth—just like the Palestinian key turning in the lock of a house on returned land.

Not so long ago, Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan witnessed yet more Palestinian homes expropriated; khalas? You left my hand holding a key without the house it opens! In this exhibition we return to the shades beneath the olive trees, to the scent of jasmine in Jaffa, the mulberries of Ramallah, the flower tatreez of Khalil, the steadfast mountains of Nablus, the sea that cradles Gaza.

In the art you are about to see, you’ll encounter a reimagined homeland—where tear gas bombs are turned into jewellery, where a grandfather’s memories are etched into every corner of the city, where smuggled sperm brings life from within Israeli prisons, where colour becomes an escape from grief, where the landscape is liberated from colonialism, where hibiscus tea returns as oil on canvas, and where “free blood will inherit the land”, once again, in Gaza.

Welcome, everyone—for this is your home. It has no key, for it was never meant to be locked.

Exhibition: Key of Return: 14th – 18th August 2025 in the Glogauer Art Gallery, Berlin.

More information on Instagram.

“In betraying Palestine, Die Linke chooses to betray every other mass progressive movement”

Interview with an anonymous member of Die Linke in Saarland


The state of Saarland, Germany’s smallest Bundesland proper, is picturesque: carved out of the densely forested lowlands of the river Saar, it borders France and Luxemburg, and with no major cities, it is generally not talked about much in German discourse. Yet beneath this quaint exterior lurks the dark underbelly of a near-totalising Zionist consensus in the organised left.

Months of Zionist harassment from ostensibly left groups in Saarland have frustrated attempts at organising for Palestine solidarity. And, in a twist especially common Germany, this harassment has often come from the parliamentary “left”, from members of Die Linke, often with close ties to Zionist organisations. The Left Berlin interviewed a member of Die Linke — who wishes to remain anonymous — about a recent event organised by the newly-founded Saarland chapter of the Sozialistisch-Demokratischer Studierendenverband (SDS), Die Linke’s student wing. The SDS, which had managed to attract a considerable anti-Zionist membership, invited experts from Amnesty International to talk about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This event, entirely predictably, went down like a lead balloon.

Can you set the stage for us a bit? What does the political landscape in Saarland look like?

There’s a lot of different actors in Saarland with many different positions when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Age groups have a lot to do with it — for example, the oldest leftist organizations in Saarland are represented by really old Marxist-Leninist tendencies, like the MLPD or DKP. There are also a few Trotskyists, but they’re not organized in Saarland. These older groups are organized in groups like the Friedensnetz, where they get together with groups across the border, in France and Belgium, mostly for demos around stuff like anti-militarism.

The middle-aged leftists here sort of form the bureaucratic body of Die Linke. They’re extremely focused on parliamentarism and winning elections, and they mostly do not actually organize outside these channels. But also they have good ties with state-funded think-tanks and NGOs, here in Saarland as well as in the rest of Germany. This group is extremely staunchly Zionist. This is partially for material reasons — it gives them proximity to the electoral system, to other parties and their Stiftungen, and to other foundations like the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung.

What separates the political situation in Saarland from other parts of Germany, however, is that the youth section of Die Linke (as well as the student organizations) tend to be extremely Zionist. The local Linksjugend, for instance, have close ties to a group called Aktion 3. Welt — this state funded think-tank that’s supposed to promote fair trade, produce and stuff like that, have better relations, better economic relations with the third world. You know, ethical coffee from Colombia and stuff like that. But if you go to their website, most of what they say is about Israel and Palestine — mostly manufacturing consent for Zionism, with close ties to figures like Ahmad Mansour.

The upshot of all this is that younger, recently-politicised Germans in their early twenties end up simply leaving the party because of how close to Zionism the Linksjugend Saar is. They just tend to stop organizing — they’ll show up for the demos against the AfD, or against anti-abortion marches and stuff like that. But apart from that, they’ll avoid joining organizations because there is no alternative.

How has this affected student organising around Palestine?

So, I’ve helped organise events with Students for Palestine. They’ve held meetings and reading circles, and they’ve been trying to communicate with the university to screen a series of films that show the situation in Palestine. And the uni always used to try to direct discourse along the lines of what is permissible, etc., so we were always told to be aware of the risks of antisemitism for example.

When asked to be more precise about what that actually is, the uni has always tended to have this line, where they want us to prepare a document that shows an awareness concept: if somebody says a particular thing, how will you respond to that? How will you throw people out when people say the wrong thing and stuff like that? All of this time, Students for Palestine weren’t really sure about how to formulate such a thing because the uni didn’t want to settle on a specific definition of antisemitism. This was in part because of the influence of the Landesregierung on this matter — If you look up the antisemitism commissioner for the state of Saarland, for instance, he is a legal scholar. And if you open any of his legal evaluations, what stands out is that his catchphrase is that nobody really knows what antisemitism is.

The implication is basically that it’s a really hard-to-define, vague concept, and therefore you have to be mindful of your words all the time because nobody can actually settle on a definition (even though we can!). The university is obviously operating within a framework that we see is very typical of the German state. You see how the Bundestag kind of keep passing these non-binding resolutions on what is or what is not antisemitic with the IHRA definition, but they make it non-binding so that you cannot make any challenges in court or attack its premises.

So, it’s supposed to be vague by definition and by design. And what tends to happen when it is left vague on purpose with both the uni as well as the bureaucrat refusing to, you know, adopt one definition or the other, it kind of leaves the room for discourse open, but also you said one wrong thing and you can be arbitrarily defined as crossing a line that you didn’t even know existed. So, that’s the situation at the university and that’s how they’ve been stalling students for Palestine for a year now.

And how did the Saarland SDS become a thing?

Two months ago, a few people in the left scene decided to start a local chapter of the SDS; these people also happened to be oriented very clearly towards Palestine solidarity. They ran for elections and won 5 out of 33 seats in the student parliament. At this point the uni’s approval didn’t matter anymore, because they had become part of the student parliament, allowing them to book rooms and organise events for eg. pretty autonomously without having to go through the university administration — which is what helped them invite Amnesty to talk about Gaza.

And the university tried to cancel this event?

Yeah — I talked to comrades within the SDS and it turns out that the uni threatened to cancel it using the Rechtsaussicht mechanism, that allows the presidency of a university to override the decisions of the student body when it feels it is appropriate, and when it deems the integrity of the university threatened. The president didn’t realise the event was happening until pretty late, since it went through the SDS and not him. Banning it last minute would have been a huge controversy though, which is why they settled on a compromise — a day before the event, he went and invited Saarland’s antisemitism commissioner to moderate the event, to prevent the event from ”going out of hand”.

The point of this was obviously to police people’s speech, to bring them closer to the bounds of acceptable speech — given his history, these bounds are left intentionally vague. The university also alerted the police and the media, asking them to be on the scene in case anything went wrong. In the end, the SDS posted to their Instagram that they had agreed to the terms of this compromise to allow the event to proceed.

How did things go down at the event?

So Prof. Rixecker, who was invited as a moderator, was asked to give a foreword to set things into perspective — the perspective being that everything Israel is doing now is a reaction to October 7, and so on. The usual thing. There were supposed to be two reports presented, the first on genocide, and the second on apartheid. The first report was very well-presented: we already know the arguments, like proof of genocidal intent, and so on. The speaker pulled out quotes of what Israeli public figures (Netanyahu, Gallant, etc.) had said.  And at the end of the first talk, there was supposed to be a round of Q&A (with the commissioner looking through every question and answer for evidence of antisemitism), that would then lead to the second talk.

The Q&A lasted the entire evening, there was no time for the second talk on apartheid. It was all pretty well-received though, apart from a few hecklers. The first member of the audience to ask a question during the Q&A, for eg., started by shouting at the Amnesty speaker, accusing them of representing a specific narrative by quoting only the government officials who say they want to commit a genocide, but not the officials that say they do not want to commit one (as if the two cancel out somehow). Another person — Hanna Akgül, who is actually in the Linke Saar Landesvorstand — argued that Amnesty was changing the definition of genocide to very narrowly make it fit this situation. There were also people arguing that everything the Israeli leadership said was an emotional response in the days after the “most dramatic event in Israeli history”, to which people obviously pointed out that you could find similar comments from two weeks ago.

The hecklers were clearly a minority, however, and most people were quite moved by the report. There was also testimony from a person from Gaza, who had lost many of his family in arbitrary airstrikes. Rixecker did have to concede that these were war crimes, with his sanctioned assessment being that that charge was sufficient — because it does not matter to the mothers whether their children died in a war crime or a genocide. Rixecker’s general stance was that what Israel are doing can be understood to hold the population of Gaza collectively responsible, but that at the same time, the civilians did hold a bit of responsibility for what happened. He basically tried to imply that there was some parallel between German civilians getting targeted during (for eg.) the firebombing of Dresden, vs. how Palestinian civilians are currently being targeted. To me, this was the crux of the evening — because this comparison is really breaching Germany’s own framework of Shoah-Relativierung.

This was something that most of the people in that room felt uncomfortable with at this point, and some of us felt that this stance deserved a proper critique from the left. But before anybody could publish anything, he was already getting attacked from the right.

What do you mean “attacked from the right”?

Hannah Akgül — the lady from the Die Linke Landesvorstand — also happens to be a member of the Deutsch-Israelischen Gesellschaft (DIG). She went on to upload an official statement on behalf of the DIG’s Junges Forum (JuFo Saar), saying that she found it unacceptable that this antisemitic event was even allowed to take place. The JuFo Saar are particularly terrible — they’ve hosted journalists from Israel Hayom (an Israeli Likud-adjacent tabloid) and have gone as far as to attack a Saarland newspaper for deigning to interview a Gazan who has lost family in the genocide. They also happen to be packed with Die Linke and Linksjugend members in Saarland.

Rixecker has also been attacked in an open letter by the Netzwerk Jüdischer Hochschullehrender; the man is now responding to open letter with open letter, fighting for his job and trying to defend himself from accusations of antisemitism. Other groups attacking him include Wertinitiative, a conservative German-Jewish NGO who have been criticised for their anti-migration positions, and their trivialisation of actual antisemitism within the AfD and Die Heimat. The Israeli consulate in Münich has also put out a statement, saying that if an antisemitism bureaucrat participates in an event that calls Israel genocidal or an apartheid state, he is the “wrong person at the wrong place”. These flames of outrage eventually found their way into mainstream state politics, with the CDU, the AfD, and the Greens all questioning whether the man was fit to retain his job. Given that the man’s a lifelong SPD member, the SPD-majority state government stood by him, defending him as someone who was “not offering a stage, but limiting it” — in his capacity as a law professor at the university, and not as the antisemitism commissioner.

Where do we go from here?

Frankly, there’s very little point in trying to engage with a lot of the antideutsch, or with the explicit right. I’m speaking as an anonymous member of Die Linke here — considering how the party is stuffed to the gills with Zionists in so many Bundesländer, particularly Saarland, I am very concerned for the future of left-wing parliamentary politics in Germany. We need an actual campaign to hold the rogue politicians in the party accountable for their attempts to sabotage people to their left, or people taking a principled stance against genocide — both within the party and without. 

Die Linke is, by its very design, radically democratic — with local, regional and state chapters having strong autonomy. This is a good thing, and it also results in important resolutions (such as the federal resolution to adhere to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, instead of the IHRA) taking a while to trickle down or trickle up before finally taking hold countrywide. At the same time, flagrant violations of such resolutions, although technically permissible, need to be seen as a bad faith attempt by the centrist bureaucratic and right-wing zionist factions to steer the party back into the comfortable arms of a reformist coalition with the Greens and the SPD. In betraying (or actively persecuting) Palestine, Die Linke chooses to betray every other mass progressive movement. When Die Linke’s Bremen & Mecklenburg-Vorpommern chapters voted for Merz’ war credits, strong condemnations and calls for resignation followed by other chapters of the party. Similar demands for consequences, for a chapter that pushes genocide denial and routinely collaborates with the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum, are a bare minimum.

Break academic ties with Israel

Statement by an autonomous students’ group at the Universität der Künste (UdK)


In the weekend of 18th-20th July, our University is putting on the spectacle of Rundgang, portraying this school as an inclusive progressive art institution, standing up against budget cuts, meanwhile they are deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine not only with its ties to Institutions that support war crimes, but also by artwashing a genocide and silencing anyone daring to speak up.

On Saturday, 19th July, we held a public performance, which took place in the garden of Hardenbergstraße 33, the main building of UdK for around 2 hours. As a group of autonomous students and visitors, who joined the performance spontaneously, we perform together to remind the university of its failure to stand on the right side of history in its past and in its present.

At the point in time as we sat in the garden Israel has bombarded every single Palestinian university in the Gaza strip. Not one Israeli or German university administraton has called on the Israeli government to cease the bombing of Palestinian universities.

While concentration camps are planned in Palestine, death tolls rise, refugee camps are bombarded, people destroyed in unimaginable ways, we watch it all, live streamed on our phones. Apathy surrounds us and echoes through the white walls of this university.

The administration has flat out ignored the demands of their students for the last two years, students who come together in solidarity as well as students, who are directly affected by the most current Genocide in Palestine. They have failed to act on the very principles of humanitarianism, decolonization and progressive thinking you advertise yourselves with. We understand that the ground we stand on is genocidal, so the responsibility you bear should be heavier to oppose such acts from happening anywhere else.

While art universities especially are supposed to give space to political discussion and foster debating, UdK is on the contrary going from restricting all places of dialogue around Palestine towards fostering racism while harassing students at the doors and intimidating any form of dissent. UdK is weaponising Anti-Semitism to manufacture consent for genocide at school and therefore in the next artist generation, fostering racism at school and within the german society, while refusing to listen to the Jewish community in the university. As well as denying Jewish students their Jewish identity. About all this you can read about in following articles:

We refuse our art to be used to normalise genocide, war and devastation from Palestine to Congo, to Sudan, to Kurdistan and Ukraine and across all oppressed people.

We demand our school to act now, according to our demands, which we appreciate to be acknowledged by the media:

1) Acknowledge the genocide, call for an arms embargo and distance yourself from the Staatsräson.

2) Cut ties with complicit Israeli Universities: no knowledge exchange with war criminals.

UdK holds exchange to the Israeli universities Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Tel Aviv; which is directly located where once the habor city Yafa was, as well as to Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

Bezalel Academy for example has direct connections to Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapon supplier and the world’s leading manufacturers of military drones. Among other universities, Bezalel Acadeemy mobilized their students to sew uniforms, including grenade holsters, for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

3) Foster and not only build but allow student autonomous spaces for dialogue about colonialism and genocide. Stop criminalizing your students, throw the surveillance structures out and use the funds that go into it to support affected students.

With increasing demonization and a hate campaign by German institutions against opposers of the Genocide: We are faced with its normalization as well as repression tactics. The university legitimize shipments of weapons that kill starved civilians which is just one of the war crimes amongst many committed by Israel on the daily.

We encourage personal talks on our own terms outside of this art performance with the administration to push understanding of their students as well as material change hand in hand with our demands at school. Amongst the performers were people who rely on student visa, who rely on student financing and who rely on the university to manage their future. The moment our performance took place, the university closed down the doors for security reasons, intimidating students that were outside and needed to get in for their stuff, who were escorted personally by security through the building and out of the building.

We want the university to be able to hold space for dissent, and protect our right to speak out. We want to be listened, but the university rather shuts down the whole Rundgang than listening to our demands, which they should be pretty familiar with by now.

We spoke yesterday and will speak in the future out loud in our deep compassion with our peers at school and in the art field, who are faced with the violence and pain of colonialism, everyday lived racism and Nazi-culture in Germany.

Sincerly,

united students, which will never be defeated (Autonomous student group)

16 August 2012: Marikana massacre

This week in working class history


In August 2012, South African miners went on strike in the Marikana mine, owned by Lonmin. Lonmin, the successor to the Lonrho firm—which was central to the apartheid economy and had been set up to seize mining rights in neighbouring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)—maintained its own police force. Even Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath once called Lonrho boss Tiny Rowland the “unacceptable face of capitalism.”

The strike, which began among rock drillers, was initially denounced as sectionalism by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the official miners’ union, which was closely aligned with the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The NUM’s increased passivity had driven many miners to join the new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), which used more militant language. 

One week into their strike, 3,000 miners held an open-air assembly, where they were surrounded by razor wire and heavily armed police and soldiers. When some workers approached the razor wire, police fired at them with live ammunition. Many were shot in the back while running away. By the end of the day, 34 miners were dead. Others were arrested and beaten in prison. 

After the event, Lonmin management solicited Cyril Ramaphosa, one of their directors, to coordinate “concomitant action” against “criminal” protesters. Ramaphosa had once been a courageous union leader and a leading militant in the ANC. By the time of the massacre, he owned 23% of Lonmin and 100% of McDonalds South Africa. He is now South Africa’s president.

The South African state charged 270 mineworkers with the murder of their own workmates under the “common purpose” law. A National Prosecuting Authority spokesperson said, “When people attack or confront [the police] and a shooting takes place which results in fatalities… suspects arrested, irrespective of whether they shot police members or the police shot them, are charged with murder.”

South African miners were no strangers to repression and injury. They had been at the forefront of the fight to overthrow Apartheid and had regularly come into conflict with the state. Between 1900 and 1993, 69,000 miners died in “accidents” and more than a million were seriously injured. But this time, the men who gave the orders to fire were not white racists, but their old colleagues in the ANC. Many concluded that while apartheid might be gone, capitalism still rules South Africa.

Norwegian elections 2025: a preview

What is going on in Norway and why you should care


11/08/2025

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway.

I was astonished to learn that my first contribution to The Left Berlin was in fact a snap analysis of the previous Norwegian parliamentary election in 2021. Things have come full circle, and I now contribute this preview to the upcoming election in September 2025, writing from Oslo, posing as a foreign affairs correspondent. 

First and foremost, it is perhaps useful to justify why the election of a somewhat obscure country of a mere 5 million people is of interest. My primary justification is that Norway is a limit case of progress under capitalism in the 21st century. The Norwegian and Swedish electorates can be considered, within a liberal capitalist framework, to be the most left-wing among advanced economies today (as this Financial Times data journalism story illustrates). A success for the left in Norway is therefore a sign of hope and an opportunity for learning, with defeat being a bellwether of global regression. 

But there are strong economic factors to consider as well. The chief among them is Norway’s role as the largest producer of oil and gas in Western Europe—a sort of Saudi Arabia of Europe on account of being both a petrostate and a monarchy. The EU is particularly reliant on Norway for meeting its energy needs now that Russia is out of the picture as a key supplier, as shown by the figures below.

Two pie charts comparing EU imports of natural gas in gaseous state by partner for the first quarter of 2024 and 2025, measured as a percentage of trade value. First quarter of 2024: Norway 46.4%, Algeria 20.1%, Russia 17.5%, Azerbaijan 7.3%, United Kingdom 4.9%, Others 3.6%. First quarter of 2025: Norway 52.6%, Algeria 19.4%, Russia 11.1%, Azerbaijan 8.2%, United Kingdom 5.0%, Others 3.7%.

Source: Eurostat. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Two pie charts comparing EU imports of petroleum oils by partner for the first quarter of 2024 and 2025, measured as a percentage of trade value. First quarter of 2024: United States 17.1%, Norway 13.7%, Kazakhstan 10.9%, Nigeria 7.9%, Libya 7.2%, Saudi Arabia 6.9%, United Kingdom 4.9%, Others 31.4%. First quarter of 2025: United States 15.0%, Norway 13.5%, Kazakhstan 12.7%, Libya 9.0%, Saudi Arabia 6.6%, Nigeria 6.3%, Azerbaijan 4.1%, Others 32.7%.

Source: Eurostat. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Furthermore, Norway has a sovereign wealth fund that owns a whopping 1.5% of all listed shares in the world. This is over 20 times Norway’s share of the global population. This figure of 1.5% is not a trifle, and the choices this fund makes can have a ripple effect on other significant market actors. The figure also doesn’t represent all the financial assets the fund controls; it is merely the headline figure. (I encourage readers to learn a bit more here.) In short, you may not be interested in Norway, but Norway is interested in you.

Setting the political scene

Four years ago, the kingmaker was the Centre Party (Sp), achieving a stunning success that propelled it to the forefront of government with 13.6% of the vote. They ran on a platform emphasising local government autonomy, fiscal discipline, advocating for the interests of farmers, and prioritising Norway over its relationship with Europe.

I predicted that this victory would prove pyrrhic. It did. Current polling predicts Sp suffering a total collapse in comparison to the previous election (see the polling comparison at NRK.no). Despite Sp getting their wish to be part of a two-party minority coalition with confidence arrangements with the Socialist Left Party (SV) and control of the finance ministry, the coalition collapsed in January of this year over Sp’s refusal to implement an EU directive on electricity markets in the EU and EEA that would have raised prices for Norwegian consumers.

Unlike in Germany, Norway has fixed-term parliaments, and early elections cannot be called. The Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, would have to limp on. The government was immensely unpopular in the lead-up to the split, with a poll in December putting the ruling Labour Party (Ap) at a catastrophic 16.8% (NRK poll), which, if realised, would be the party’s worst vote share since their first parliamentary election in 1906. Furthermore, the far-right Progress Party (FrP) has usurped the Conservative Party (H) as the flag-bearer for the so-called bourgeois (borgerlig) parties. Their extremist leader, Sylvi Listhaug, was in prime position to become the next prime minister. So how, within the space of eight months, has the man that I described to be dull as dishwater managed to turn this hopeless situation around?

Return of the king

Enter stage right: Jens Stoltenberg. Fresh from his tenure as the second-longest serving secretary general of NATO and the most significant Norwegian politician since perhaps the father of the nation Einar Gerhardsen himself, the former two-term Prime Minister and predecessor as party leader was appointed by Støre to the finance ministry, replacing the embittered Trygve Slagsvold Vedum. At a stroke, as if by the aid of Faust himself, polling improved dramatically. Ap went up to 20.2% in January and then 28.7% in February before settling around the 30% mark now. More significantly, this expansion in support for Ap came directly at the expense of the major parties of the right and centre. In a moment of crisis, Støre ran to daddy and daddy delivered. It is now Støre’s election to lose.

Norwegian commentators are utterly mesmerised, struggling to explain how this reversal has come about. They make vague allusions about Stoltenberg’s reassuring qualities vitalising the animated corpse of Ap. Meanwhile, to a Norway observer looking in from the outside, it’s rather sheepishly simple to explain. It’s the Orange Man stupid.

The counterfactual to assess is: would Støre’s party have experienced a revival of some sort on its own as the carnage unleashed by Donald Trump on the world became more pronounced? It’s a coin toss; I would hazard to say yes, but not enough to win an election. The truth is that Norwegian voters were being offered three bad choices for leadership, and now they have one tolerable option on the table, namely a fusion between Støre and Stoltenberg. In an unstable international order, a country whose national self-conception is one of being an insecure upstart will seek to rally around something that promises to help them weather the storm. 

Source: Ali Khan.

Ap is the natural party of government in Norway, and Stoltenberg is its most decorated politician of the century. In a world beset by crises, he and his name are a constant in Norwegian public life. (His sister led the Norwegian public health institute during the pandemic and became a regular face on the TV). For a country that feels insignificant, he is the only person of international significance it can lay claim to. The timing of his entry into government was indeed brilliant and Støre should thank Vedum for having left in a huff. Trump’s tariff wars and mania have poisoned any political party or leader who is seen as vaguely aligned with him. For Norway, bordering Russia and a founding member of NATO, Ukraine is an especially pertinent theme, but so is Palestine. 

Trump is seen as an enemy of Ukraine, a friend of Putin and Netanyahu, and therefore, his brand is toxic for Norwegian politicians. No party has a stronger association in Norway with Trump and the Republicans than FrP. The rise of the FrP to pole position on the right has ironically strengthened Ap—centrist voters from H and Sp have likely migrated to Ap, reducing the former two to their core rumps of supporters. The rise of the far-right in Norway, troubling as it is, has helped consolidate the left bloc. 

The collapse of the centre-right

In all this fanfare about Stoltenberg, it is easy to overlook that he was in fact defeated by a right-wing coalition of H and FrP, led respectively by Erna Solberg and Siv Jensen. This same coalition defeated Støre in 2017. It is not enough to say that FrP is toxic—Siv Jensen oversaw a great moderation in her party that made it palatable— is it enough to say that Erna Solberg, a two-term PM herself, does not represent reassurance. Events have conspired to make things the way they are.

Erna Solberg is a compromised candidate. She was embroiled in a corruption scandal involving her husband making trades on the stock market based on privileged information gleaned from his wife. Solberg somehow survived this scandal as opposition leader by claiming to be a victim of sexism being made to pay for the sins of her spouse. She managed to survive the storm but has been plagued ever since by the stench of corruption. It is a nice testament to the standards of public life in Norway.

The third candidate for prime minister is odiousness personified. Sylvi Listhaug (FrP) had to resign as justice minister for a Facebook post claiming that the Labour party cared more about the rights of terrorists than the nation’s security. She voted against gay marriage before changing her tune to go with the times. She supports moving the Norwegian embassy to Jerusalem and is the staunchest pro-Israeli politician in frontline Norwegian politics. As early as January 2024, 47% of Norwegians supported a boycott of Israel, a number that surely must have skyrocketed by now. Though she claims to be against Donald Trump, describing herself as a Reaganite, she is firmly aligned with the European far-right, having vocally supported the Sweden Democrats (a party with neo-Nazi roots), and the convicted Danish Social Democrat immigration minister who was found guilty of violating the rights of Syrian refugees. She has led her party to the forefront of the Norwegian right, received millions of kroner in financial support from the private sector and their front groups, but her support has a ceiling due to her reputation as a polarising figure. 

The story on the margins

Unlike the previous election, which saw significant movements on the margins of Norwegian politics, this election is relatively subdued. Minor parties have long played a decisive role as their ability to get at least 4% of the vote can determine the colour of government (red or blue). Sp ensured that the far-left could be shut out of any decision-making last time, but, should polls bear out, Sp would be leapfrogged by the very party they sought to act as a guardrail against—delicious schadenfreude. 

Where previously it was a tremendous breakthrough to go from 2.4% to 4.7% between elections, this time the far-left Red Party (R) might expect a modest 1% increase in support and gain one extra member in parliament. The other left party, SV, is practically fossilised around 8%, statistically tied to its previous result despite fresh leadership. Disappointing. It is a tug of war between these two parties to claim supremacy over the mantle of left-wing opposition to Ap, despite there being little to distinguish the two parties. R is a more Eurosceptic, left-purist party, while SV has been carrying the banner for socialism much longer, and their ideological purity has been diluted over time due to the hard business of negotiating with power.

The biggest change on the margins is the fate of the Green Party (MdG), which narrowly failed to cross 4% last time but has since receded to under 3%. They are now irrelevant. Their singular focus on environmentalism has left them crowded out. They are a retail politics party, and not a lot of people are buying their organic produce. The Bible bashers at the Christian Democratic Party (KrF) are doing one big heave to break past 4%, having slipped under last time. If they do, that would ironically shift the parliamentary arithmetic in favour of the radical left parties. The weird eco-market liberals at the Liberal Party (V), the closest parallel to Germany’s FDP, are hovering steadily above 4%. Should they go under it would help Støre, since H and FrP would have no coalition partners to speak of—another sign that fate has conspired against the right for once.

FrP and H have run a boring, old anti-tax, pro-business, red-scare election campaign, conjuring apocalyptic visions for the Norwegian economy should a Støre government have to rely on the Marxists to have a majority. The wealth tax instituted by Ap has been their biggest bone of contention, and they are raising the spectre of tax increases should R have any say on policy. Once again, it is ironic that should Norwegian voters want to avoid this situation, their best chance lies not in supporting the right but rather defecting to Ap, such that a majority without R would be possible. They’re cooked as Gen Z might say. The right only has itself to blame for its woeful unpreparedness for the world-historic juncture at which Norway finds itself. 

Conclusions

The centre-right gambled on trusting Solberg to lead them, and the gamble failed. The far-right gambled on leaning on its inherent extremism and succeeded a little too much, alienating the otherwise moderate Norwegian electorate that spends a little bit more time touching grass than being driven to extremism on Facebook than its peers in Europe. All the left bloc had to do was not interrupt their opponents while they made their mistakes and let world history push them over the edge. 

Frankly, Listhaug is an evil woman, a blight on humanity. Her only chance of success lies in somehow detoxifying herself along the lines of Georgia Meloni in Italy. She has undergone something of a makeover in the lead-up to the election, while still hoping to draw attention away from herself as a potential PM, even though she is now clearly the main alternative to Støre. The state broadcaster still frames it as a contest between Støre and Solberg—a complete mystery—but he is seen as the preferred PM candidate to Solberg by a margin of 10% in polling. Compared to Listhaug, the numbers would be even worse, and Listhaug would probably be glad if nobody even frames that question. She’s a burglar hired by private firms and lobbyists for Israel trying to get into the PM’s office through chicanery and deceit. It would be a tragedy if she won somehow, but, as things stand, it is very unlikely. On the other hand, the radical left should consider it a success if it holds its position in conditions where other radical alternatives tend to get their lunch eaten.