OSLO: The masked man in the picture aims a shotgun at the reader. “This man is of foreign origin!” says the text underneath. “It’s dangerous and a direct attack on us,” 31-year-old Somali immigrant Farhan Dalman said as he sat with friends in a side-street travel agency in Norway’s capital.
The picture is the front page of a brochure published by Norway’s Progress Party ahead of a Sept. 12 election which could propel it back into parliament as the second largest party, the biggest on the right and as a potential kingmaker.
Led by 61-year-old Carl Hagen, the Progress Party has won popularity with promises to cut immigration, slash taxes and spend part of Norway’s oil wealth on Mediterranean retirement homes for elderly Norwegians.
It has recently been trying to temper its anti-immigration image and broaden its appeal but some politicians say its election campaign proves it has not changed, comparing it to France’s National Front and Austria’s Freedom Party.
“This is a new low and places the Progress Party on the far-right of European politics,” Olaf Thommessen, deputy leader of the small ruling Liberal party, told the daily Aftenposten.
In the travel agency, where the walls were plastered with posters of Asian and African cities, Dalman agreed.
“When old people sitting in their flats see this, they think all foreigners are criminals.”
Norway is still largely homogeneous after only a few decades of immigration — non-western immigrants make up under 6 per cent of its 4.5 million people, less than other Scandinavian countries and low by European measures.
Progress’ parliamentary secretary Per Sandberg says immigrants cause many problems. They do not learn Norwegian, soak up state funds and commit most of the crime, he says.
His party won nearly 15 per cent of the vote in an election four years ago and is now polling around 20 per cent — competing with the centre-right Conservative Party for second place in the vote for the 169-seat parliament.
An opposition Red-Green alliance led by the Labour Party has opened up a lead in the polls but analysts say the vote is too close to call. Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik’s Christian People’s party is polling around 10 per cent.
