Green European Journal: The 2021 election in Norway had the climate as a defining issue. What is driving the debate this time around?

Elin Lerum Boasson: As in many other countries, the climate question reached its highest point in 2019, but in Norway, this conversation didn’t result in many concrete climate governance changes. By the time the vote took place in 2021, the climate conversation was already faltering.

We know from research that the prominence of debates related to the environment and ecology naturally fluctuates, as is the case with most other political issues. Right now, climate is not high on the agenda, but at least it has become part of everyday politics. Like everywhere else, defence and international security more broadly have risen to the top of the political agenda, along with the consequences of Trump’s return to the White House.

The centre-left Labour Party has been leading a minority government since early 2025, when the Centre Party left the coalition over a dispute on Norway’s adoption of EU energy rules. Is the green transition still a source of political conflicts?

For a long time, Norway had only one party that was clearly against climate policies – the populist right-wing Progress Party. But in the last decade or so, the Centre Party, a former agrarian party, has also taken on an anti-climate stance. Since 2021, as a junior coalition partner to Labour, the Centre Party has been very effective at hindering the strengthening of climate policies. It left the government over disagreements linked to the adoption of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, the Renewable Energy Directive, and the Energy Efficiency Directive, which Norway is obligated to adopt as a member of the European Economic Area (EEA).

Ultimately, Labour saw these disagreements as an occasion to get rid of their coalition partner, and pre-election polls seem to suggest this was a winning strategy. The Centre Party performed really well in 2021, but its success was based on electoral promises that were impossible to keep – on rural development, for example. When this became obvious, its popularity declined quite quickly. Labour also benefited from the return of Jens Stoltenberg, the former prime minister and NATO chief, who is now serving as finance minister.

All this shows that we shouldn’t interpret these developments as evidence that the green transition is high on the agenda. If anything, the Labour government has weakened Norway’s climate commitments. It has also introduced costly energy subsidies to guarantee fixed electricity prices for consumers, instead of focusing on energy efficiency and prioritising industrial and strategic energy uses.

Is the shift towards the far right observed in many European countries also visible in Norwegian politics?

I wouldn’t say so, even though the Progress Party has overtaken the centre-right Conservative Party in the polls. But unlike Germany’s AfD or the Sweden Democrats, the Progress Party doesn’t have a dark history or clear fascist origins. When it was founded in the 1970s, it was mostly about economic liberalism and the rejection of taxation. Later, it took on anti-immigration stances in line with other populist right-wing parties in Europe.

It’s also worth saying that, while the urban-rural divide has long been a defining issue of Norwegian politics, this hasn’t played much into the hands of the far right. In many European countries, farmer protests were framed as a revolt against climate policies, but that hasn’t been the case in Norway.

How did the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine influence Norwegian politics?

Even before February 2022, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the government promoted tax cuts for the oil and gas industry. Later, Russia’s war on Ukraine caused sharp increases in oil and gas prices. These developments, combined, have boosted the profitability of fossil fuels enormously, and predictably, investments have reached new highs. Norway’s economy is completely locked in with fossil fuels, including in terms of political support, which means that the only way it can cut emissions from oil and gas exploration is by electrifying its offshore installations. Of course, these emissions are a fraction of those generated by the burning of the fossil fuels that Norway exports.

If the Ukraine war strengthened the arguments against fossil fuels in the EU, in Norway, it had the opposite effect. The oil industry has succeeded in shaping how Norwegians perceive climate and energy policy. It has become common sense to think that, because the EU now needs our oil and gas as it reduces its reliance on Russia, Norway should keep investing in fossil fuels. There is this narrative that Norway is doing it for the rest of Europe.

How is the ever-expanding fossil fuels extraction reconciled with Norway’s self-portrait as a climate leader?

Norway pours a lot of funding into genuinely good initiatives, such as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+). But of course, it is in an ambiguous position when it comes to climate policies. As a member of the European Economic Area Agreement but not of the EU, Norway is expected to contribute to Europe’s climate goals, but it’s not bound by the EU’s Climate Law.  For example, the EU’s Emissions Trading System has been a gift to Norway, because its corporations can invest in emissions reductions elsewhere.

The EU’s Emissions Trading System has been a gift to Norway, because its corporations can invest in emissions reductions elsewhere.

At the same time, Norway doesn’t have a strong national climate commitment, and in the last decade, while the EU’s climate policies improved tremendously, Norway has fallen behind. Unlike EU member states, Norway submits its own Nationally Determined Contributions to the UN and the Paris Agreement, but rather than submitting a national climate target, we submit a target that we will work together with the EU in achieving.

Despite the lack of a clear target and an overarching emissions reduction strategy, modest emissions reductions have been achieved, mostly through ad hoc decisions and strategies. Norwegian policies for promoting electric vehicles are an example of a very successful climate policy, although it came about in an incremental way.

The bottom line is, our current relationship with the EU enables us to be inside EU rules when it suits us, and outside when it doesn’t. It’s a kind of cherry-picking that the EEA Agreement is not supposed to allow for.

Norway has a history of Euroscepticism. Its citizens voted against EU membership twice, in 1972 and 1994. Has the current geopolitical climate changed the attitudes of Norwegian citizens?

Something has changed, especially with Trump’s return to the White House, and we can’t rule out that the conversation on EU membership will come to the fore again in the next four years. Labour and the Conservative Party, traditionally the country’s main political forces, are both in favour of EU membership. However, they are wary of reopening the debate, let alone during an election campaign, because the topic is very polarising.

Given the reluctance of mainstream parties, small parties have become the more vocal supporters of EU membership. The Green Party, for example, has taken a very pro-European stance.

What are the main reservations that remain in Norwegian society against EU membership?

Part of the problem is a general lack of understanding of what EU membership would entail. As an EEA member, Norway already introduces a lot of EU legislation, but without the public discussion and democratic debate that come with being part of the EU.

Fisheries and fishing quotas have been a contentious issue in the relationship with the EU, but that mostly affects the northern parts of the country. Agricultural policy is a bigger source of discord: there is a perception that EU membership would end Norway’s agriculture as we know it. This might have been true in 1994, but Norway’s agricultural practices have changed a lot since then, and the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy grants member states more leeway to shape their agricultural sector. What would likely change with EU membership is that agrarian interest organisations would lose their power to design agricultural policies. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of resistance to this, and the movement against EU accession has always been financed by farming interests.

In comparison to other Green parties in Scandinavia, Norway’s Miljøpartiet De Grønne has struggled to assert itself in the political arena. Why?

Compared to Denmark’s or Sweden’s, Norway’s Green Party has remained small and marginal for a longer period. In the case of Sweden, I believe the strong performance of the Greens in last year’s European elections was a reaction to the weakening of climate policies by the current Swedish government, which relies on external support from the far-right Sweden Democrats. In Denmark, climate action enjoys a broad consensus across the political spectrum, and the country has bet on the green transition as a key to its economic prosperity.

Compared to Denmark’s or Sweden’s, Norway’s Green Party has remained small and marginal for a longer period.

We should also note that there are other parties in Norway that have a strong pro-climate stance, notably the liberal Venstre and the Socialist Left. Much of Norway’s climate policies owes to these smaller parties, because they pushed bigger coalition partners to take action. This doesn’t mean Greens are irrelevant, but they are just one among several pro-climate voices. In 2021, they won three seats but came very close to the 4 per cent threshold, which would have granted them a share of the proportionally distributed seats.

In May last year, Norway was one of a few European countries that officially recognised a Palestinian state, 30 years after hosting the Oslo Accords. Has Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza influenced the election campaign?

The Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t a big source of division in Norway, because for many years, public opinion has been overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian.

However, it was revealed during the campaign that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund [established in 1990 with revenues from the oil industry] had investments in companies linked to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and military operations in Gaza. This sparked outrage, and the government openly acknowledged that it had to strengthen its oversight and the Council on Ethics [which evaluates whether the fund’s investment in specified companies is inconsistent with its ethical guidelines].