As we have heard, since I visited Eriksen that second time, Norway has had a general election. The comedians are now in power – the Progress Party being part of the new ‘blue’ governing coalition. The party started out in the early seventies as an anti-tax movement. Today, it is run on a hybrid right-wing/welfare-state platform of a type which can seem quite odd from a UK or US perspective, blending as it does calls for increased public spending, with emphasis on care for the elderly, together with more conventionally right-wing fear-mongering about non-Western immigrants. It is a similar
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