A dramatic rise in support for a far right party, the Progress Party (PP), has turned the Norwegian election on Monday week into a test of how genuine this country's commitment is to consensus politics and its particular brand of egalitarian social democracy. Playing on resentment against asylum seekers, wage restraint, and concerns about the creaking state of Norway's health and elderly services, the PP's charismatic leader, Mr Karl I. Hagen, has been putting the governing Labour Party under severe pressure. And, with a poll showing at the beginning of the campaign of 25 per cent - although down in the latest to 17 - he has dramatically overtaken the Conservatives as the country's second party.
Mr Hagen's demagogic recipe of tax cuts, health service privatisation, and improved pensions, all paid for by cutting Norway's overseas commitments - it is the largest per capita contributor of overseas aid in the world - has tapped a mood of anger at the disciplines imposed by a government committed to fiscal tightness.
"It is pure protest," says the former leader of the Conservatives, Ms Kaci Five, joining other leaders in pledging not to coalesce with the unpredictable Mr Hagen. She expects the vote to decline as at last the parties engage the PP in a real debate about its alternative.
Labour's former Prime Minister, Ms Gro Harlem Bruntland, blames the Conservatives, who have undoubtedly lost most to the PP, for failing to provide a coherent choice for the right. Yet Labour, too, has lost ground and must be concerned at the general erosion of confidence in politicians that Mr Hagen's support reflects.
In part that undoubtedly stems from the perceived lacklustre quality of the current leaders of all the mainstream parties, and most notably Labour's Mr Thorbjorn Jagland. He has promised to resign as prime minister if his minority government receives less than the 36.9 per cent it got last time, although observers suggest he may just scrape it again if PP support continues to ebb.
A poll on Tuesday puts Labour on 32.5 per cent, the PP on 17 per cent, the Conservatives on 16 per cent, the Socialist Left on 6.5 per cent. The three-party, centrist alternative government could barely muster 25 per cent.
Led by the Christian People's Party, the alliance includes the country's anti-EU Centre Party and Liberals. It is campaigning for an increase in public spending on health and the elderly of about 1 per cent of GNP and is opposed to left and right by the financial orthodoxists of Labour and the Conservatives.
If Labour does not manage to form a government, it is difficult to see how such an alternative coalition could survive the need to build a new majority on every vote. The CPP leader, Mr Kjell Magne Bondevik, insists, however, that it will be possible, berating the Conservatives for not coming into the alliance to provide a more clearly viable alternative to the PP.
And the deputy governor of the Central Bank, Mr Jarle Bergo, warns that calls for additional spending are "adding fuel to an economy already running at full capacity, and are not well advised". The economy is undoubtedly doing well. Growth has been steady for four years and will total some 3.6 per cent this year. With oil included the figure rises to 4.5 per cent.
The current account surplus is running at 8 per cent, with the Government actually able to plough billions into a reserve "Petroleum Fund" intended to cushion the effect of the decline in oil revenues expected to start gently in the new millennium.
Total employment has risen to an all-time high, with unemployment down to 4 per cent.
Yet such success brings with it dangers. Norway's remarkably tight incomes' policy - agreed at national level between employers and workers - is under strain.
Another pay deal will also be more difficult because the LO wants to trade its members' restraint for a massive extension of workers' rights to continuing education.
Perhaps surprisingly, despite the bitter referendum campaign in 1994, the EU has scarcely raised its head as an issue in the election.