Leader: Norwegian conditions

Send your reaction to: debatt@nytid.no or dag@nytid.no

Follow Dag Herbjørnsrud on www.twitter.com/DagHerbjornsrud

Municipal elections. Usually, a municipal election is not that important. But for the Danish Socialist People's Party (SF), the precursor to Norwegian SF (today's SV), Tuesday's local elections can have dramatic consequences in the long run.

For the last two years, SF has been the governing party together with the Social Democrats – Denmark's answer to the Labor Party. And not unexpectedly, SF declined sharply, but also more than that: Dramatic decline, from 14,5 percent in 2009 to 5,6 percent now in 2013. Support was thus cut to almost only a third.

But chairman Annette Vilhelmsen – or frontwoman / party leader, as one would say in the otherwise more reactionary Norway – then also points out that the election result in 2009 was record high. In both 2001 and 2009, the party received barely 7 percent of the vote. In this sense, SF is now more back to the "normal", with a further weakening due to government wear and tear along with a much larger Labor party.

We recognize this at home here, where the SV already in the municipal elections in 2007 went back after two years in government with the Ap: With 6,5 per cent then there was a halving from 2003 and a prediction of the result to come in 2009.

But even then, and now, one often compares SV's result with the election winner in 2001, when the party received as much as 12,5 percent support. But 2001 was, like 2009 for SF, almost an exceptional year. 2001 was the year when the Jens Stoltenberg I government lost so fast – after a tearing power struggle and a privatizing and rarely right-wing Labor policy. Most 2001 voters from the Labor Party were only on a temporary loan for SV that September day – at least until the US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.

Blame on the government

Danish SF can therefore take lessons from the experiences SV made during his eight years in government. And it is a question of how long SF will also dare to sit in government with a large social democratic party, without having to injure its soul.

Or as political mayor Jonas Dahl says to Politiken, the reason for the SF loss is more to be found in the government offices at Christiansborg than in the municipalities:

"There is no question at all that there are some national political issues that influence this election result that we can in no way be satisfied with," Dahl said Wednesday.

There is something more to that statement.

While party leader Vilhelmsen replied candy: "It would have been fun to stand here tonight with my arms up and a fantastic result. That's not how it went. It's not your fault. Obviously, I have a huge responsibility. I'm chairman of SF, ”it read.

There is almost something more in that statement too. Or as she continued:

"We have taken on a responsibility by entering into a government cooperation, and I still believe that is the right thing. It has given us some knobs, but I still think it's the right thing to do. We have gone for influence, I think that in the future we must do that too. ”

Red progress

The Social Democrats are still Denmark's largest party after the municipal election on Tuesday, with 29,5 per cent. After all, Prime Minister and party leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt is still standing.

But the election's big winner is the Unity List, on the far left wing – corresponding to the Norwegian Red. The party received 6,9 percent – an increase of 4,6 from the local elections in 2009. No other party did as well.

The tripling in support means that the party is taking steps in municipal and city councils across Denmark, Aftenposten points out: “With this begins a new chapter in our history. After today, the Unity List will never be the same party again, ”said front figure and spokesperson Johanne Schimdt-Nielsen election night.

"The unit list is now a municipal power factor built on the foundation of a pure SF massacre," Berlingske writes in the leaderboard. There is something there.

Urban conservatism

Best of all, the radical party is doing it in Copenhagen. The unit list gets 19,5 percent there and becomes the second largest party in the capital.

There are also several interesting differences from Norway, such as with regard to the radicals in the big cities: In Copenhagen, a new SF mayor is also given the next four years, which would have been unthinkable in the conservative cities of Bergen and Oslo.

The rumors of the global radicalism of the urban and their generally solid world view are probably greatly exaggerated. Some political phenomena are even more Danish than Norwegian. ■

(This is an excerpt from Ny Tid's weekly magazine 22.11.2013. Read the whole thing by buying Ny Tid in newspaper retailers all over the country, or by subscribing to Ny Tid -click here. Subscribers receive previous editions free of charge as PDF.) There are minor adjustments in the web version compared to the paper version of this text.