Ola Bog (Liberal Party ‘Venstre’) asks why “so few dare to say the obvious” about the Progress Party (FrP) and Anders Behring Breivik.
The answer is simple: because it is not obvious. It is a line of reasoning that presupposes political guilt can be inherited from one individual by an entire political party, almost twenty years after he himself resigned from it.
Breivik was a member of the Progress Party’s Youth (FpU) and the Progress Party (FrP) from 1997 to 2007. He actively resigned almost twenty years ago – according to his own account because he believed the party was too liberal on immigration policy. The fact that a future mass murderer was, for a period, a member of a party that had around 24,000 members at the height of its popularity says nothing about the party’s policies today. It says something about Norway being a small country where most political parties have, at one time or another, had members who later went on to commit terrible acts.
Should the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) be held responsible for every single former member who has committed criminal offences after leaving the organisation?
The same logic can, incidentally, be turned against Bog’s own party. The Sterilisation Act of 1934 (Steriliseringsloven) – which in practice was used to sterilise members of the Romani/Tater community because, in the preparatory works to the Act, they were described as an “inferior ethnic group” and intellectually compared with “Negroes, Indians and Mexicans” – was passed under Johan Ludwig Mowinckel’s Liberal Party (Venstre) government, with unanimous support from, among others, the Labour Party (Ap). At the time, the parliamentary Labour Party group was led by Johan Nygaardsvold.
The policy of assimilation nevertheless continued through decades of Labour Party governments after the war, including at the Svanviken Labour Colony, where more than one-third of the women were sterilised between 1949 and 1970. The Norwegian state did not issue an official apology until 1998.
According to Bog’s own logic, must not the Labour Party also be held responsible for this today?
Svanviken Labour Colony. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Bog then spends most of his article in Dagsavisen discussing something entirely different: that the apartheid regime in South Africa provided financial support for Anders Lange’s election campaign in 1973. This is historically interesting, but it is not an argument against the Progress Party in 2026. The party has changed leader four times since 1973, its programme has been rewritten countless times, and none of today’s elected representatives had even been born when South African government officials boasted about the donation to Lange.
To dredge up a fifty-year-old source of campaign funding in order to discredit a political party today is not the communication of history – it is searching for a spade when what one really wants is a club.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the argument becomes absurd. If an Arsenal supporter commits mass murder, it does not follow that Arsenal Football Club bears responsibility or ought to be dissolved. A sports club, like a political party, is not identical with every individual who has at some point been associated with it.
The irony is that Bog concludes by calling for the authorities to “ban racist, fascist and Nazi organisations” – implicitly meaning the Progress Party. A party that has served in government, represents hundreds of thousands of voters, and currently leads the opinion polls ahead of the 2029 election is thus to be outlawed because its founder accepted money from the wrong regime half a century ago, and because a terrorist was a member for ten years before resigning in anger because the party was not radical enough for him?
It is not the Progress Party that has an explanatory problem here. Rather, it is those who believe that guilt by association is a serious political argument – right up until it is directed at their own party.