The Norwegians held an election yesterday and the outcome is giving world capitalists a minor case of the pip. The NY Times timorously announced the results today with—

By a narrow margin, Norwegian voters appeared Monday to have transferred power from their center-right government to a left-wing coalition headed by the Labor Party leader, Jens Stoltenberg.

Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik refrained from conceding defeat, but with more than 90 percent of the vote counted, most analysts agreed that Mr. Stoltenberg's "red-green alliance" of the Labor Party, Socialist Left Party and Center Party had won a slim parliamentary majority, ending four years of weak minority rule under Mr. Bondevik.

Forbes reassured everyone with the headline "Norway election seen having little impact on markets, currency - analysts."

Aside from the repudiation of neoliberal economics, there's a "minor irritant" for the Bush administration in the election outcome—

"The most important thing the Americans will notice is that the main lines of Norwegian foreign policy will remain fixed," Mr. Stoltenberg, 46, said in a pre-election television appearance. "But they will also notice that we pull back our soldiers from Iraq."

Mr. Bondevik's government was divided over the invasion of Iraq but afterward dispatched a token corps of 10 officers to help rebuild the country.

One less participant in the Iraq Coalition.

Norway has been raking in the oil dollars, and the current government wanted to ... what else? ... cut taxes. But Labor had other plans. According to Stephen Castle in the Independent,

The Norwegian opposition party regained power in the oil-rich country's general election yesterday ... after wooing voters with pledges to plough cash into their already generous welfare state system.

Even before the latest surge in oil prices, Norway was ranked for five consecutive years by the United Nations as the best place to live in the world. Yet its low unemployment and a much-envied social security system have not stopped the issue of how much the government spends from dominating debate in the world's third-largest oil exporter.

The Times account shows the financial imprudence of the Right—

Under Mr. Bondevik's fragile coalition of Christian Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, Norway experienced a surge in prosperity, with the stock market tripling since early 2003 on the strength of oil exports. Interest rates fell sharply, personal incomes rose and the United Nations Development Program designated Norway the best country in the world in which to live.

But letting the good times roll is not really the Scandinavian way. Even at the cost of moderately higher taxes, most Norwegians on Monday seemed intent on protecting or expanding generous sick-leave, pregnancy-leave and job-security policies along with subsidized day care and free college tuition.

Like Mr. Stoltenberg, Mr. Bondevik campaigned as a champion of social spending, but his commitment to keeping interest rates low and cutting future taxes made him seem the guardian of a business-friendly status quo. He also lost votes to the far right Progress Party, which became Norway's second-largest party on Monday. It demanded even larger tax cuts than Mr. Bondevik was willing to countenance and proposed balancing the budget by raiding an oil-revenue fund set up to serve future generations.

A Norwegian paper, the Aftenposten, offered an interesting sidelight on the election. It seems the Norwegian system shocked a group from Central Asia and the Caucasus who had come to observe a democratic election.

Hailing from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia,

The observers checking municipal voting stations noted that it was possible in several places to vote without an election card or identification, often, but not always, because a person was acquainted by controllers.

The conclusion was that mutual trust was essential for Norway's elections to proceed the way they do and that cheating would be laughably easy, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports.

Besides the lack of consistent identification practices, the absence of security guards at voting stations and the ability to take as many ballot papers as desired were also deemed noteworthy and slightly unsettling to observers used to strictly monitored elections.
....

Conservative Party leader Erna Solberg told NRK that it was important to remember that the election observers in Østfold are used to far different conditions prevailing during voting.

"We must remember that those that are observers here come from a completely different background of experience, where each little opportunity to swindle and cheat must be countered by regulations and practical routines," Solberg said.

Apparently the observers have Republicans where they come from too.

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