Then the letter from Mustafa arrived:
You are fighting in vain Mr Hagen! Islam, the one true faith, will be victorious here in Norway, too.
It was 1987. The number of asylum seekers and refugees coming to Norway had shot up. From around a hundred per annum, the figure had risen: almost nine thousand had sought refuge in the last year. The Labour government planned a campaign to explain to people why Norway would have to take more refugees.
At an open election meeting in Trøndelag Hagen started reading out parts of the letter. ‘“Allah is Allah and Muhammed is his prophet,”’ he read. ‘“One day mosques will be as common in Norway as churches are today. My great-grandchildren will see this. I know, all Muslims in Norway know, that the Norwegian population will find its way to the faith one day, and this land will become Muslim! We are having more children than you, and a considerable number of true Muslim believers come to Norway every year, men of a fertile age. One day the infidel cross will be wiped from your flag!”’
This threat shocked the audience. The letter from Mustafa proved to be a turning point in the immigration debate, which came to dominate the election campaign that year. It later turned out that the letter was bogus. It was clearly a gaffe, but Hagen protested his innocence. He had done nothing but read from a letter he had received.
In any case, the party’s support tripled in comparison with the general election two years before, gaining 12 per cent of the vote. In the big cities, where immigration was at the highest levels, the party polled between 15 and 20 per cent.
‘A political earthquake,’ declared the party chairman. The Progress Party was here to stay.
Hagen was an absolute master at setting groups against each other. He particularly favoured referring to the elderly on one hand and the immigrants on the other as examples of worthy and unworthy recipients of state subsidies. Through the 1990s the party demanded that some kind of migration accounting system be set up to establish the cost and calculate the long-term consequences of the growing number of immigrants from foreign cultures. The party spokesman on immigration policy, Øystein Hedstrøm, took the line that the influx of refugees was eroding people’s morality as taxpayers because they were unwilling to make contributions that went to finance immigration. Many asylum seekers were not prepared to work because they could live well on financial support from the state, he said. What was more, the foreigners provoked in the Norwegians feelings such as ‘frustration, indignation, bitterness, fear and anxiety that could lead to psychosomatic illnesses causing absence from work and instability at home’. He claimed that hygienic standards in the shops, restaurants and stalls run by foreigners were so poor that they could make customers ill, which again would have an economic impact on society.
Hedstrøm foresaw that the rising levels of immigration would lead to violence perpetrated by Norwegians. ‘There is a great risk that these negative emotions will find an outlet in violent reactions in the not so distant future,’ he predicted in 1995, at about the same time as Anders Behring Breivik gave up tagging and weeded the immigrant slang out of his vocabulary.
Before the election that year it emerged that Hedstrøm had close contact with racist organisations such as the Fatherland Party and the White Electoral Alliance. The party leadership muzzled him, but the links did not appear to damage the party, which in Oslo had its best-ever election and gained 21 per cent of the vote.
In 1996, the year before Breivik joined the Progress Party, it had turned its rhetoric against immigrants in the direction of a critique of Islam. In his speech to the party conference that year, Hagen launched an attack on the imams. The state ought not to be supporting fundamentalism. ‘The imams are against integration and interpret the Qur’an in a way that is dangerous to the Muslims and the new generation. They should not gain any power in this country. It is a kind of racism that gives the imams in Norway power over others. The imams require education in Norwegian practices and customs and training in how to behave here,’ he claimed. In his opinion, the Muslims had taken no decisive steps towards integration and the growth of fundamentalism had frightened Norwegians. He cited the demand for Muslim schools, segregated swimming lessons and protests against religious education lessons based on Christianity, as well as the demonstrations against The Satanic Verses, and the attack in 1993 on the book’s Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, who was shot several times in the chest and shoulder, but survived.
‘Gangs are prowling the streets, stealing, going to discos in a group, fighting and committing rape in Oslo. The immigrant associations are fully aware of the situation but don’t want to cooperate with the police for fear of being called informers. They have to protect their own. These bullies are not seen as criminals but as brave, bold heroes in this section of immigrant culture. If no one speaks out against this macho culture now, it could become a time-honoured tradition in our country.’ This was the way Hagen sounded in the 1990s. ‘When the imams preach that the Norwegians are infidels, there are automatic consequences. It means among other things that it is the duty of the Muslims not to pay taxes, that they can steal from the shops with no moral scruples and that they can tell lies.’
After al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001 the Progress Party stepped up its rhetoric, in line with world opinion. Muslims were ruthless and dangerous. The Progress Party saw the world as George W. Bush did: us and them.
The party was flying high in the opinion polls. With the upturn in public support, the party wanted to expand its organisation. To reach out to more people, the party had to be visible at the local level and particularly among young people. That was when it decided to set up local branches, the ones that had appealed to Anders as party fortunes prospered.
He seldom spoke in plenary sessions. The few times he did address the floor, he gabbled nervously. He had written anything he said down in advance and read it in a monotone, without emotion.
He was not at home at the lectern. The internet was to be his territory.
The summer of 2002 was approaching. After an almost snowless winter and a glorious spring, the meteorologists said Norway could expect its hottest year in over a century.
As people sweated away in their offices, the parties’ nomination battles were in full swing. There was vicious jostling for places on the lists for the city council elections the following year. Anders was staking everything on a political career, so he simply had to get nominated. He made himself as visible as possible and was an active contributor to the Progress Party Youth’s new online debate forum.
‘We needn’t be ashamed of being ambitious!’ he wrote one light night in May, in one of his first posts. ‘We needn’t be ashamed of setting goals and then reaching them! We needn’t be ashamed of breaking with established norms to achieve something better!’ Norway had such a loser mentality, he argued. A Norwegian would just stand there waiting, cap in hand. He would never put himself forward, but would follow the example set by our unassuming forefathers. This had to change, wrote Anders, using the new members of the royal family to illustrate his argument. In one of his first posts he expressed his support for Crown Prince Haakon’s marriage to Mette-Marit, a single mother with a four-year-old son, and for Princess Märtha Louise’s fiancé Ari Behn, an author whose books were steeped in drugs and dark, wild lifestyles. He praised the two new spouses for being individualists. Had they been rich, dull, conservative figures, no one would have criticised them, he wrote. No, Norway should learn from the US, where the key to success was: 1. You’re the best. 2. You can make all your dreams come true. 3. The only limits are those you set yourself. ‘Meanwhile, the wise goblins will sit on the hill and say something completely different: 1. Don’t think you’re anybody. 2. Don’t imagine you can achieve anything. 3. Don’t imagine anybody cares about you.’