(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The photo Øystein Kleven took in Flå in Trøndelag on 6 August 1969, when he was a photographer for Dagbladet together with journalist Per Vassbotn, says in a way everything about the Center Party – back then: We are of course talking about the underpants photo of Per Borten, the chief himself. And when we now call the deceased Borten a "chief", it is no coincidence. Even Einar Gerhardsen does not find it natural to call "the Labor Party leader", much less do we use the word about Carl I. Hagen, and no matter what one thinks about Finn Gustavsen's efforts for SF and SV, "chief" is somehow a bit wrong.
This is of course due to the fact that it was not as a center-right politician alone that Per Borten was "chief", the term rather plays on the term "peasant chief". Of course, there were some of them in the Center Party at the time, small and large chiefs, mostly men, most of the peasants. Another picture I remember is of Johan J. Jakobsen EU night in 1994: Somewhat broad-legged, he stands there, with each hand around the lapels, and sees the results ticking in. You could se on a man if he was a farmer and a center party.
Last weekend, the Center Party held its national meeting, and has now received the highest proportion of women in its central government, according to Klassekampen. Six out of ten central board members are women, six out of ten parliamentary representatives are the same. In addition, they have the highest percentage of female list peaks, and it is not difficult to predict that if Sp gets four members of government after the election this fall, then only one of them is a man. And this man, first deputy leader Lars Peder Brekk, is also not a farmer, but the head of Innovation Rørvik.
The less pleasant way to refer to the old Center Party, than to say that it was a party of (peasant) chiefs, is to say that it was an old party. And one could and should expect the party's death not only as the old men age, but also as the agricultural sector in Norway is partly rationalized and partly reduced. There is little doubt that it presents challenges for an interest party when the stakeholders disappear – look at the Labor Party – but the Center Party has quite impressively undergone a formidable generational change.
The farmer's daughters, many of whom left the farms in favor of university and college education in densely populated areas, many of them educated in vocational groups where the SV obtains many of its votes. And so many of them stuck to their fathers' party, despite the class trip.
Now it is the daughters who have taken the positions of power, a slow transition, a calm generational change, which of course is not new – Anne Enger Lahnstein's leadership period showed for the first time that something really new was brewing – and then it is perhaps no wonder that the Center Party leader Åslaug Haga not only declares himself a feminist. There are many who do, Siv Jensen included, but Haga also believes that Sp is a feminist party. Even in SV, that self-image has been deep down.
The daughters' takeover of the Center Party has not only paved the way for new life for a party that would otherwise have died on a cot, but it has also paved the way for a radicalized Center Party. Although Per Borten, in the years before he died, did not exactly express enthusiasm for former government partners, although Johan J. Jakobsen probably looks favorably on the political course under Anne Enger Lahnstein and Åslaug Haga, it is difficult to imagine that the old chieftains could lean then to the left itself. Not primarily because they would not have been believers in it, but because the electorate had hardly accepted it.
Well, the Peasants' Party entered into a crisis settlement with the Labor Party in 1935, and thus opened up for many years of Labor Labor. But the crisis settlement was precisely a crisis settlement. When the Center Party now, under the leadership of Åslaug Haga and her women, aims for an alliance with both the Labor Party and the Socialist People's Party, it can not be explained by "crisis", and even the Socialist Party as good horse dealers becomes too simple an explanation.
But Inga Berit, the noble girl from Farmen on TV2 and almost-parliamentary candidate for Nord-Trøndelag Sp, is not so easy to distinguish from her urbanized sisters, or from SV's Inga Marte. The Center Party's path from the center / center-right, via the center-center to the center-left is not just about political newsorientering at the top level of the party. It has been a successful generational change that probably makes the predictions about the Center Party's imminent death very exaggerated.
