Last summer, when Jonas Gahr Store, Norway’s Prime Minister, inaugurated the new National Museum in Oslo, he acknowledged that at 6.1 billion Norwegian kroner (625 million euros), “l’addition [était] salty”. But there is no doubt that the country can afford this luxury.
With its Norwegian slate (gray schist) facade and white marble upper part, Scandinavia’s largest museum bears witness to the country’s oil and gas wealth. Today, certain districts of Oslo no longer have much to envy to Qatar or Abu Dhabi.
Vulnerability to attacks against its pipelines
Not far away, on the shores of the fjord, an imposing 13-storey museum dedicated to the artist Edvard Munch, best known for The Scream, opened last year – it cost just 2.25 billion crowns (216 million euros), a straw. Several other jewels of modern architecture have grown up alongside beautifully preserved old buildings in Oslo.
This wealth also has embarrassing consequences for Norway: knowing that over the past year its energy revenues have increased fivefold thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some accuse the country of “to profit from” of the war, while ordinary Norwegians see their electricity bills, food prices and monthly mortgage payments soar.
Another worrying issue is the vulnerability to attack of the roughly 9,000 kilometers of pipelines that carry Norwegian oil and gas south, following the sabotage last month of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Drones have been spotted near offshore oil and gas platforms, and a Russian citizen was recently arrested at the border with Norway in the Far North as he was returning home with two drones in his luggage, photos and videos.
Stuff tax hikes
All of this requires skill on the part of Store, 62, an aloof man who one would not expect to be the leader of the Labor Party. His popularity rating has been at half mast since he became Prime Minister in October 2021 in a minority coalition with the Center Party (Agrarian).
“He sounds like an old-fashioned diplomat, which doesn’t work in today’s populist political environment, where you have to communicate with emotions, in a personal way, comments Eirik Bergesen, who presents a talk show on the private channel TV2. I have friends in his practice, and they tell me they would like to squeeze a smile out of him some time