In a new book, former ‘Conservative Party’ Prime Minister Erna Solberg launches a scathing attack on her ‘ally’, Progress Party leader Sylvi Listhaug.
– I do not recognise myself in her account of me. I’m not interested in arguing about last year’s snow, but am looking ahead to next year’s local elections and the 2029 parliamentary elections,” writes Sylvi Listhaug in a comment to NTB.
This follows the publication of Erna Solberg’s new book *My Life as Erna*. She criticises Listhaug for not being willing enough to compromise with the Labour Party and the Liberal Party, and for having created greater divisions within the centre-right.
“I had absolutely no faith that Sylvi Listhaug could become Prime Minister. If we were to secure a centre-right majority in the election, we were dependent on both the Christian Democratic Party and the Liberal Party clearing the electoral threshold,” says Solberg.
Listhaug hits back, arguing that it is clear the Conservative Party (Høyre) continues to blame the Progress Party (FrP) for their heavy election defeat.
– This is Erna’s book, written in the wake of one of the Conservative Party’s biggest election defeats, for which many in the Conservative Party still wrongly blame the Progress Party. It was she herself who made the question of the Prime Minister a key issue in the final stages of the election campaign, whilst I and the FrP tried to talk about policy and why we had to replace the Støre government,” comments Listhaug.
It was only recently that the Progress Party was recorded at 37.6 per cent in an Opinion poll. Høyre received 12.5 per cent in the same poll. This meant the FrP was larger than both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party combined.
According to Nettavisen commentator Skjalg Fjellheim, who has read the book, Sylvi Listhaug is cast as the ‘super-villain’ in Erna Solberg’s book, and writes:
It is intended to strike a blow – and strike it hard. Because this is personal. And if I understand Solberg correctly, Jensen, as leader of the Progress Party, was everything that Listhaug is not.
Solberg describes Listhaug as immature and rigid, and completely uninterested in following up on Jensen’s project, which was based on pragmatic cooperation and compromise.
If the aim is to curb the Progress Party’s growth and its brutal encroachment on the Conservative Party’s voter base, these attacks are coming well into extra time, now that the Progress Party has stabilised at a support level of over 30 per cent.
