DEBATE: Now things are starting to move among people. Dagbladet’s new poll on the monarchy shows that popular support for the monarchy fell from over 80% to 67.7% in a short time.

Debate

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And if you look at young people in the 18-29 age bracket, less than half are actually positive about the monarchy. This bodes very well for democracy in Norway. Because one cannot deduce that a hereditary monarchy is a fundamental democratic problem.

One point of Dagbladet’s article was that they did not find a corresponding increase in support for a republic. This does not surprise us in the least, because no one is constructively promoting a republic as a form of government, apart from the association Norway as a republic and the 35 representatives of the Storting who voted for a republic in the June 1 vote. last year. Representatives from across the political spectrum then voted for a republic, except for the representatives of KrF and Sp who voted in unison for the monarchy. All the other parties were divided.

We recently spoke to many representatives of the Storting, and there are very few principled monarchists there, as there are in the rest of the population. The attitude among these is the same as in the general population – why should we replace something as long as it works?

Norway’s interest as a republic is that it doesn’t seem good and unifying, when at least a third of the population doesn’t want it at all. And it is a discriminatory arrangement that presents Norway as a country left behind.

Because no European country has gone from republic to monarchy since the dictator Franco introduced monarchy in Spain, quite the contrary, there are more and more republics in the world. Now, most recently, Barbados in 2021, which changed its head of state from the British monarch to its own president. And it looks like other countries could follow suit very soon, big countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

We are also convinced that people would have had a much more positive view of the republic if there had been public education about what it might entail. The first objection that we receive from many people when we broach the subject is: do you then want Carl I. Hagen or Trump as president? Because people tend to think of Trump, Macron, Putin and more when they hear the word republic.

Nobody in our association wants us to have a presidency like the French, the Russian or that of the USA. There are other models like German, Icelandic or Finnish for example. We are convinced that the population will make the right choice within a reasonable time.