Gunman alienated by party's softened rhetoric

NORWAY'S POLITICS:IN THE initial shock of Friday's twin attacks in Norway, black and white images of the smoking justice ministry in central Oslo evoked New York's World Trade Center minutes before its collapse a decade ago.

Within hours, however, Norwegians realised the attack had more in common with the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Relief that this was not an Islamist attack – which some feared could prompt a backlash – is now tinged with confusion about the consequences of an attack from within.

Stern pronouncements that the attacks would not shake the foundations of Norway’s open and tolerant way of life are admirable, but it is hard to imagine this Nordic society can emerge entirely unscathed. Norway has no script for an event like this.

“Had this been an al-Qaeda attack by a bearded fanatic with whom we have nothing in common, we would have had a way to discuss the politics of Norway’s role in Libya and Afghanistan,” said Prof Thomas Hylland Eriksen, anthropologist at the University of Oslo. “But this is a nice middle-class boy from the western suburbs of Oslo. He’s 100 per cent made in Norway, which makes it emotionally more difficult to deal with.”

Over the weekend attention shifted to the populist, far-right Progress Party, Norway’s second largest party, after it emerged that the alleged gunman was a paid-up member for a decade until 2007.

“It makes me extra sad to know that this person once was a member in our party,” said leader Siv Jensen in a statement yesterday. “Those who knew the suspect . . . have said he seemed like a modest person who seldom engaged himself in the political discussions.”

The Progress Party has been around since the 1970s, though it has never held office. Under former leader “King” Carl Hagen, the party built up a large voter base by promising to use oil revenues to top up pensions while cutting high taxes and slashing Norway’s considerable aid to the developing world.

Siv Jensen, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin, has maintained the party’s criticism of the EU and immigration. She warned of Norway’s “Islamisation by stealth” in the 2009 general election, but only after years of softening the rhetoric to widen the party’s appeal. That alienated Anders Behring Breivik and others, who felt a 10 per cent population of immigrants, over half of them non-European, was too high in a country of 4.9 million.

Her party’s rebranding plan now appears in disarray ahead of municipal elections in September.

Disaffected former members such as Breivik continued their campaign online without formal party structures, discussing issues familiar from extremist groups elsewhere on the continent, in particular a conviction that Islam is incompatible with democratic values and that Muslims are plotting a takeover of Europe.

“They see multiculturalism being pushed by an elite who are deceiving the people,” said Prof Eriksen of Oslo University, who is name-checked several times in Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto.

“I’m targeted because for about 20 years my basic message is that we are going to have find ways to live together because pluralism is not going away. There is no going back to pre-war Norway.”

Several analysts have suggested it was the virtual, online nature of Breivik’s actions that kept him below the radar of police until Friday’s attacks. But the link back to the established Progress Party remains clear.

“The Progress Party have changed from having clear racist elements to more PR-polished ones, who knowingly drop a few racist remarks to consolidate part of their electorate,” said commentator Eirik Bergesen. “But there are parallels to the rhetoric of this gunman.”