Gro Harlem Brundtland.© World Economic Forum (http://www.weforum.org)
Harald V; Stoltenberg, JensThe Norwegian government gathering at the Royal Palace in Oslo, Norway, on October 20, 2009, with King Harald V (centre) flanked on the immediate right by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.Berit Roald—Scanpix/Office of the Prime Minister of Norway
Harald VHarald V, 2007.Photo: Jarle Vines A year later the Labour government fell and was replaced by a centre-coalition minority government, with Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian People’s Party as prime minister. (King Olaf V died in 1991 and was succeeded by his son, who ascended the throne as Harald V.) Bondevik remained in office until 2000, when his government was replaced by a minority government led by Jens Stoltenberg of the Labour Party, whose brief tenure ended in 2001 with the return of Bondevik at the head of another conservative coalition. In 2005 the so-called Red-Green coalition led by Stoltenberg triumphed in the general election, and he again assumed the position of prime minister, this time at the head of a majority government, which was returned to power in elections in 2009.
On July 22, 2011, a pair of terror attacks stunned Norway. At 3:26 pm local time, a bomb exploded in central Oslo, seriously damaging government buildings and killing at least seven people. Hours later, a gunman disguised as a police officer opened fire on a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya, roughly 25 miles (40 km) from Oslo. The gunman, armed with an automatic weapon and a pistol, killed more than 65 people during an hour-long attack. Police apprehended a suspect in the shooting and stated that the two attacks were linked. The next year the entire country followed the trial of the accused killer on television and grieved with the survivors and families of the victims of the attack. In the end the defendant was convicted and received a 21-year sentence, the maximum allowable under Norwegian law, though that sentence could be extended should it be determined that he remained a threat to society.
Flowers adorning a memorial outside Oslo Cathedral for victims of the July 22, 2011, attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya.© Vegard Saetrenes
Since the 1970s a central issue in Norwegian politics has been the exploitation of the rich natural gas and petroleum deposits in the Norwegian part of the North Sea. As the Norwegian petroleum industry grew in importance, the country became increasingly affected by fluctuations in the world petroleum market, but in the late 20th and early 21st centuries oil revenues played the dominant role in fueling a prosperous Norwegian economy and providing Norwegians with one of the world’s highest per capita incomes. The government, prudently preparing for a time when petroleum profits might not be so lucrative, began reinvesting those profits in the Government Pension Fund (originally the Government Petroleum Fund). Even as much of the rest of the world struggled in the wake of the international financial crisis that began in 2008, Norway continued to prosper, with its economy continuing to grow steadily and unemployment remaining low at about 3 percent.
By 2013 the Government Pension Fund had swelled to some $750 billion, yet, despite the continued economic prosperity under Stoltenberg, the Norwegian electorate seemed restive as it rejected his government in parliamentary elections in September 2013. Although Labour captured the largest number of seats for any single party (55), the centre-right bloc led by the Conservative Party took 96 seats, and Conservative leader Erna Solberg became the first prime minister from her party since 1990. She headed a minority coalition government with the Progress Party, whose anti-immigration stance had mitigated against attracting a third party to the coalition, preventing it from forming a majority government, .
Jens Stoltenberg, 2009.Guri Dahl/Office of the Prime Minister of Norway
Although the Liberals and the Christian Democrats chose not to join the new government, they agreed to support it in return for a promise that amnesty would be granted to some asylum-seeking immigrant families and for guarantees that oil drilling would be banned during the next four years in the vulnerable fishing areas in the Lofoten-Vesterålen island groups. The Solberg government responded to the increasing influx of migrants seeking asylum (especially from the Syrian Civil War) in 2015 with a combination of providing shelter and assistance, offering monetary compensation for repatriation, and pursuing stricter immigration policies.
As declining world oil and gas prices began to hinder the growth of Norway’s economy (Norwegian oil giant Statoil reported its first quarterly loss since 2001 in the third quarter of 2014), Norwegian politicians and businesspeople began planning for a future with diminished petroleum output and revenues.. Solberg tackled these economic challenges by cutting taxes, investing in infrastructure, and borrowing from the Government Pension Fund Global. By the time parliamentary elections rolled around in 2017, the economy had gradually rebounded, and the Norwegian electorate rewarded Solberg by making her the first leader of a centre-right government in Norway in more than three decades to win consecutive terms. In the September polling, Labour (led by former foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre) continued to hold the largest number of seats in the Storting, but Conservatives and their coalition partners maintained their narrow majority. Postwar foreign policy
When the antagonisms between the great powers came to a head in 1948, Norway took part in the negotiations set in motion by Sweden on a Nordic defense union. The negotiations produced a tacit Cold War “Nordic balance.” For instance, in 1949 Norway, followed by Denmark, joined the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but NATO was not allowed to establish military bases or stockpile nuclear weapons on their territories; Sweden remained neutral. The compensation for these self-imposed restrictions was a gradual improvement in relations between the Soviet Union and the Nordic countries.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s revived an old problem concerning the boundary between Norway and Russia in the Barents Sea of the Arctic Ocean. Once merely an esoteric legal issue, the boundary took on great importance because of its strategic naval relevance to Russia and because extensive deposits of petroleum and natural gas may lie beneath the shallow waters.
At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, Norway began to play an increasingly active role in world affairs, mediating between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and between the government of Sri Lanka and Tamil insurgents, as well as sending troops to serve in Afghanistan as part of the NATO force that responded to the Taliban government’s support of al-Qaeda, the Islamic extremist group that was responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Norway also contributed warplanes to the NATO mission in Libya in 2011.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea during the Ukraine crisis of 2014, its continuing support for separatist rebels in Ukraine, and its general flexing of its military muscle had the Norwegian military approaching Cold War levels of alert in 2015. Whereas the Norwegian air force had settled into a kind of equanimity on its border with Russia during the 1990s and early 2000s, its interception of border forays by Russian aircraft increased by more than one-fourth from 2013 to 2014 and by sevenfold over the levels of a decade earlier. Jörgen Weibull Gudmund Sandvik The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica