Norway’s right wing on defensive after July attack

Associated Press

OSLO, Norway

Warning voters about the danger of increasing Muslim influence in Norway, the Progress Party rode a wave of anti-immigrant feeling and took nearly a quarter of the seats in parliament in the country’s last election.

Now one of Europe’s most successful right-wing parties is on the defensive after one of its former members massacred 77 people in the name of fighting immigration.

The Progress Party has confirmed that Anders Behring Breivik, the confessed perpetrator of last month’s massacre, was a member between 1999 and 2006. That has focused intense criticism on its platform of sharply cutting the immigration that is changing Norway’s once virtually homogenous population of white Christians.

“They have to change their tone,” said Magnus Takvam, a political commentator for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. “They have to reconsider their vocabulary.”

Progress Party leader Siv Jensen has been criticized for warning of a stealth Islamization of Norway. And in May, the party’s leader in Oslo called the governing Labor Party’s immigration policy a “demographic experiment” and said a left-wing political elite was allowing Western civilization to be eroded by Muslim immigrants with opposing values.

Breivik also condemned leftists for their tolerant attitude toward immigrants from the Muslim world, but Jensen, 42, noted that he condemned all of Norway’s political parties, “mine included,” in the rambling 1,500-word manifesto he released before the massacre.

Breivik, 32, says he grew disillusioned with the party and concluded that the only way to stop what he called the “Islamization” of Norway and Europe was through armed struggle.

“He has obviously developed some very, very strange, sick ideas over the years,” Jensen told The Associated Press. “His manifesto is perversely unique and cannot be linked to any organization or legal political party of Norway.”

First elected into Parliament in 1973, the Progress Party steadily has gained support for its calls to sharply cut immigration and lower taxes, primarily by spending more of Norway’s oil revenue now, instead of saving it for future generations.

No longer a maverick opposition group, the Progress Party now boasts support that few of its counterparts in Europe can match. It won 41 of the 169 seats in Parliament in the 2009 election, its best result ever. Only the Labor Party is bigger, with 64 seats.

But the July 22 terror attacks, which shook Norway to the core, have generated a wave of sympathy for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s Labor Party, the apparent target of the attacks. Polls show its support surging, ahead of local elections in September.