US Politics Mega-thread - Page 901

Firstly, while I voted for the party most distant from the progress party in the previous election, I actually feel that I need to defend them a tiny bit. While it would be wrong to say they have nothing in common with other far-right/anti-immigration European parties, because they have certainly garnered a lot of support due to their more restrictive immigration policies and anti-immigration rhetoric, they don't deserve to be coupled with golden dawn, sweden democrats, vlaams blok and some of the more extreme ones. (In fact from a quick reading - I actually had no idea about this until just now), it seems like comparing them to the successor of Vlaams Blok - Vlaams Belang - is much more fitting.

Basically, the party was first founded in 73 and at first was more of a libertarian party, immigration wasn't much of a national issue then. During the late 80s and 90s though, Norway was becoming more multicultural and partially because of the progress party making it a big issue, it became one. And during this period of time, the progress party looks really bad and downright racist - the party leader Carl Ivar Hagen used a fabricated letter from a supposed Islam extremist threatening with the eventual overtaking of Norwegian society during an election campaign - and creating a fear of immigrants for then to use it politically gave them their best election result to that date - jumping from around 4% to 12% of the votes. This was in 1987 - and during the 90s there were multiple situations where leading members of the progress party were caught having meetings with known neo-nazis. The thing is though, these members were always swiftly expelled from the party. And the party, while it has always had some "loose cannons" on deck and continues to allow or even encourage fringe members to make semi-racist statements, which moves the political discourse a tiny bit every time it happens, has really toned down or even legitimately gotten rid of the racist elements from the most influental party ranks, and out of all their ministers in the new government (7 total), none of them have really profiled themselves as anti-immigrant or anti-muslim.

In reality, the new government including the progress party is not all that more restrictive than the old social democrat government was. Granted, many of the people who voted for the progress party and also some of their fringe and older members have stated their disappointment with this, which again is something that the central power of the party is mostly happy about (party members stating their disappointment and getting attention through anti-immigration rhetoric) as it continues to lock down the anti-immigration vote.

What I would say is the reason for the progress party's success when Norway hasn't really suffered any economic downswing during the economic crisis and where the "they took our jobs" argument obviously has no place in the Norwegian political context is rather a unique situation which arises due to our absolutely immense "government pension fund" (or oil fund). This is estimated to reach $717 billion by the end of 2014 - our country has 5 million people - this leaves like $140k for each individual. The political parties with the exception of the progress party basically have this agreement to not spend more -and preferably less - than the yearly income from the pension fund's investments, set at 4%. While Norway is obviously doing really great, it's always possible to make it better, and not everything is great for everyone. For the people who are poor, who are constantly fed news articles about how this is the best country in the world, but also fed articles about how the Norwegian welfare system is under threat by Muslims who procreate more and work less, who just might not be all that happy about how life is in this greatest of all nations, it's a tough sale - I mean, it doesn't even require them to be prioritized, they just don't understand why we can't just spend 6% or why we can't decrease taxes - this isn't even stuff I can really claim to understand myself, but I've understood it to have something to do with not wanting to over-inflate the economy and all that- I buy that at face value without having any scholarly understanding of the subject anyway.

I think most of the progress party vote belongs to that group. Immigrants are part of the equation here, occasionally due to plain nationalism, fear of Muslims, love of "traditional Norwegian culture", because we need to protect our women from gangs of rapists that plague the streets of all our cities, but more than anything because they threaten the Norwegian welfare system. I definitely think there's an element of plain selfishness here, for example the progress party often states "we should help them there rather than here", but then they also want to make harsh cuts to foreign aid while claiming/thinking that more free trade is what development countries need.

Like, I don't want to understate how they are anti-immigration, because it's certainly an important element in understanding the progress party and their success, but it's more of a dissatisfaction party. There are elements of the party and voter base who just plain don't like Muslims, but what I guess I'm trying to state more than anything is that the problem is that Norwegians are basically supposed to be so happy with how things are here because it's such a fantastic country - but then life actually isn't that great for a lot of people. Even though we're rich, not everyone gets to enjoy the great wealth adventure, immigrants are a good scapegoat for those people. Our wealth and job availability just makes it so that instead of immigrants being the cause for why our society is currently troubled, they become the reason why our future is looking bleak. To me and most other Norwegians - the progress party got 16% of the votes - the reason why the future is looking so bright is our sensible economic politics, for the progress party voters, the immigrants are the reason why we have to be so cheap and why they can't get more.

And I guess outside Norway, one of the things people know about the progress party is how Breivik was a member of their youth party. And once again, while I totally don't support them, this just isn't fair; Breivik left the youth party because he couldn't garner any support for his political views, and certainly none for his methods.

In addition to all this, Norway has a genuine problem with bureaucracy. Here, the progress party has been the staunchest opponent of this and they have a lot of credibility here. And hell, even I think they have some good points here.