Has it become harder to govern the Nordics?

The parliamentary elections in Norway on 13 September gave a clear red-green victory. The country's prime minister will therefore sometime in October be Jonas Gahr Støre from the Labour Party. He would prefer to govern in a majority coalition together with the Center Party and the Socialist Left Party (SV). During the election campaign, the Center Party insisted that they did not want to govern together with SV.

The three red-green parties won 89 seats. 85 seats are required for a majority in the Storting.

Four parties risked not getting over the 4 % electoral threshold limit. Two succeeded – the Red Party ( Rødt) and the Liberal Party (Venstre), while two ended up below the limit – the Greens (MDG) and the Christian Democrats (KrF).

For the MDG, which got 3.94 % of the vote, only about 1,700 votes were needed to cross the threshold – in which case the party would have received 4 – 5 leveling seats. MDG only won 3 direct seats, the same as KrF. Rødt and Venstre received 4 and 5 of the 19 leveling seats respectively, and thus 8 seats each in the Storting.

A new party, Patient Focus, received one direct seat from Finnmark. The party is a protest movement against the closure of the hospital in Alta. The party received 4,950 votes, or 0.2 %. But that was enough in Finnmark, which has five direct seats to distribute and 54,608 eligible voters.

As a result, there are now 50 parties represented in the Nordic parliaments.