Norway

Case notes

Progress Party

The Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, FrP) is the successor to Anders Lange’s Party for a Strong Reduction in Taxes, Duties and Public Intervention founded by Anders Lange in the 1970s. Following Lange’s death the party was renamed the Progress Party and led by Carl Hagen for 28 years until 2006. The party was initially a neo-liberal anti-tax party, but came to focus more on immigration in the 1980s. Progress’s populism has always been seen as somewhat questionable by regional scholars (Jupskas 2013, 205). In particular, the Progress Party invites problematic comparison with its Danish namesake, in part because the two parties have had a very similar chronology and ideological history in their early years. Unlike Danish Progress, under Hagen’s leadership the Progress Party gradually increased its vote share throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and has become a major party in Norway and a member of government since the 2013 elections. After Hagen stepped down from its leadership in favour of Siv Jensen in 2006 Progress became a much more staid part of the party system – a blander and less confrontational liberal party (Bjerkem 2016, 237) – and we don’t consider it populist by our definition from this point.

In its early years Progress was concerned mainly with shrinking the state, especially reducing tax rates. Higher rates of immigration in the mid-1980s saw more nativist anti-immigration politics creep into the party platform (causing significant factional conflict) such that this was a core element of the party by the early 1990s (Jupskas 2013, 214; Widfeldt 2000, 491; Bjerkem 2016, 235). According to Hagelund, this began as a kind of welfare chauvinism in line with the party’s dominant neo-liberalism, but gradually morphed into a more sociocultural and nativist form around 1993 (Hagelund 2003, 53). Since the 1990s the party has consistently argued for lower levels of immigration (Jupskas 2013), and housed several controversial anti-immigration politicians from the 1993 election until before the 2001 election, when a group of them were expelled (Hagelund 2003). Hagen himself campaigned on the threat of a Muslim invasion of Norway as early as the 1980s (Betz n.d., 120). However the primacy and position of this kind of socio-cultural politics in the party is debated. Hagen has attempted to distance Progress from other far-right parties in Europe, describing Jean-Marie Le Pen for example as “disgusting, and a pure racist” (Jungar and Jupskås 2014, 228). Given this ambiguity, we have coded OTH_ETHNIC at 2, and OTH_IMMIGRANTS also 2 except for the 1993-1997 elections, when it escalates to 3 on the latter (see Hagelund 2003 for details of this shift). Further research may refine the dates and degrees of this movement.

Opposition to political elites has always been an important part of Progress’ appeal (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, 201; Jungar and Jupskås 2014), embodied by slogans like “the party for ordinary people” (Jupskas 2013, 206). The party has been considered equally anti-establishment as other right-wing populist parties in the region (Bjerkem 2016, 236). However it seems that under Hagen’s leadership this was somewhat more tempered than other right-wing populist parties, and we have not found many anti-establishment statements on par with genuine 3s in this category (OTH_POLCLASS = 2). Further research should confirm this. Progress is market-friendly (Jupskas 2013, 216), and does not criticise economic elites (OTH_ECONOMIC = 1), nor does it have a consistent Eurosceptic stance (the party is actually highly divided on the EU question) (OTH_FOREIGN = 1).

Hagen’s leadership was evidently important to the party’s political meaning (Widfeldt 2000, 490), however the fact that there have always been factions opposed to him within a fairly robust party organisation make it less personality dominated than other similar parties (Jupskas 2013, 221) (CHARISMA = 2). There is no evidence of any violation of liberal democratic norms (LIBDEMNORMS = 1) and the party was never in government in the period included in this dataset (INSIDER = 1).

References

Andersen, Jørgen Goul, and Tor Bjørklund. 1990. ‘Structural Change and New Cleavages: The Progress Parties in Denmark and Norway’. Acta Sociologica 33 (3): 195–217.

Betz, Hans-Georg. n.d. Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Accessed 6 July 2019. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780312083908.

Bjerkem, Johan. 2016. ‘The Norwegian Progress Party: An Established Populist Party’. European View 15 (2): 233–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-016-0404-8.

Hagelund, Anniken. 2003. ‘A Matter of Decency? The Progress Party in Norwegian Immigration Politics’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29 (1): 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183032000076713.

Jungar, Ann-Cathrine, and Anders Ravik Jupskås. 2014. ‘Populist Radical Right Parties in the Nordic Region: A New and Distinct Party Family?’ Scandinavian Political Studies 37 (3): 215–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9477.12024.

Jupskas, Anders Ravik. 2013. ‘The Progress Party: A Farily Integrated Part of the Norwegian Party System?’ In Exposing the Demagogues: Right Wing and National Populist Parties in Europe., edited by Karsten Grabow and Florian Hartleb, 205–36. Brussels and Berlin, Centre for European Studies and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Widfeldt, A. 2000. ‘Scandinavia: Mixed Success for the Populist Right’. Parliamentary Affairs 53 (3): 486–500. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/53.3.486.