Immigration debate mars Norway’s liberal reputation

Immigration debate mars Norway’s liberal reputation

MORTENSRUD (NORWAY) — Ms Lise Ulvestrand and her husband went to the southern Oslo town of Mortensrud in 2005 for the space, the forest and the cheaper rents. A former development worker in Latin America and a social worker who worked with Norway’s immigrants, she says she is comfortable around foreigners and different cultures.

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MORTENSRUD (NORWAY) — Ms Lise Ulvestrand and her husband went to the southern Oslo town of Mortensrud in 2005 for the space, the forest and the cheaper rents. A former development worker in Latin America and a social worker who worked with Norway’s immigrants, she says she is comfortable around foreigners and different cultures.

However, as the number of immigrants, including Muslims, gradually increased in Mortensrud, she began to worry about her children and their education. So, the Ulvestrands decided last summer to move back to comfortable western Oslo, where she grew up. The family wanted a stable environment and had some questions about the social challenges at the children’s school, where the non-ethnic Norwegian majority was growing rapidly.

Their concerns about immigration and perceptions that Islam is challenging prevailing national values are widely shared, both among some Norwegians, like the Ulvestrands who are on the left of the political spectrum, and among many on the right, who in September put the Conservative Party into office after eight years of Labour Party-led leftist coalitions.

The intensifying debate about immigration has focused on the anti-immigration Progress Party, which is part of the new Conservative-led government. It came under intense scrutiny in 2011, when a former member, Anders Behring Breivik, bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, before going on to kill 69 others at a Labour Party summer camp on the island of Utoya. Breivik quit the party in 2006 because he felt it was not sufficiently radical.

Mr Ketil Solvik-Olsen, Minister of Transport and Communications and a deputy leader of the party, scoffed at the notion that the party had anything to do with Breivik’s ideas. “We are strict on immigration, but this is not a war on cultures. Our idea is to protect our welfare system,” he said.

Instead, he spoke about the kind of discomfort that the Ulvestrands felt. “Some people feel they wake up one morning and their old neighbourhood is gone,” he said. “Strangers move in and people don’t even understand what they’re saying; we have a generous welfare system and you feel like a stranger in your own neighbourhood.”

After the killings and a disastrous showing in local elections in 2011, the populist party began tamping down more extreme voices. In September, the party won 16.3 per cent of the vote, down from the 22.9 per cent it won in 2009, but enough to form a coalition with the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Erna Solberg.

The Progress Party is now considered mainstream and its level of support has required “more moderate rhetoric” than that from smaller, more extreme parties such as the Swedish Democrats, said Mr Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo.

“Yet they firmly belong with other parties … that see immigrants, and in particular Muslims, as a threat to the integrity of society,” he said.

The party, however, is facing criticism by older, more ideological members and beginning to lose support in opinion polls. Mr Anders Romarheim, a fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies said the new acceptability of the party may have encouraged the fierce anti-Islam opinion that remains prevalent on Norwegian social media.

However, there is also a new reticence about public rhetoric, the Prime Minister said in an interview. Public discussion of Islam is less about their beliefs or their colour and more about lack of education and need for training, Ms Solberg said.

Mr Hylland Eriksen said Breivik’s massacre had regrettably little lasting impact on Norway’s politics. “Some of us were hoping that it would serve as a loud and clear reminder of the need to accept that we live in a culturally diverse society,” he said. “Instead, the political dimensions of the attack have been consistently dodged.” The New York Times