This is not the start of his mandate that he had dreamed of. On Thursday, October 14, Norwegian Labor Jonas Gahr Store took office as head of a minority coalition government, made up with the centrist party, a month after the parliamentary elections on September 13. For the first time in eight years, the right is found in the opposition.
The time should have been for celebration for Mr. Store, who had been waiting for this moment since he took the head of the Arbeidarpartiet in 2014, succeeding his mentor, Jens Stoltenberg, appointed NATO Secretary General. But it’s impossible not to think about the attack that left five dead and three wounded the day before in Kongsberg, southwest of Oslo, which the intelligence services now consider a probable terrorist act.
Transfer of power
Despite the tragic events, the handover took place as planned on Thursday. At 61, Mr. Store, married with three children, succeeds the patron saint of the Conservatives, Erna Solberg, Prime Minister since 2013. Four years ago, he almost deprived her of a second term. But, a few months before the election, his party had slipped in the polls, and Labor had lost the election.
Son of a ship broker and a librarian, Jonas Gahr Store was then criticized for being out of step with the voters of his party. First of all because of her fortune: inherited from her family and estimated at 140 million crowns (14.3 million euros), she comes from the sale of the Jotul wood stove company, which her grandfather has saved from bankruptcy. Also criticized, his elitist side and his ways of bureaucrat extremely competent, but not very charismatic.
Perfectly French-speaking, the Norwegian Prime Minister studied at Sciences Po Paris, then went to the prestigious London School of Economics, before joining Harvard University. In 1989, Gro Harlem Brundtland, tutelary figure of the Labor Party, made him one of his closest advisers. He followed the latter to Geneva in 1998, where she became head of the World Health Organization, before becoming himself Secretary General of the Norwegian Red Cross.
Minister of Foreign Affairs under Jens Stoltenberg from 2005, he worked to strengthen ties with Russia, even managing to resolve an old maritime dispute between the two countries. In 2008, during a visit to Afghanistan, he survived a Taliban attack on the hotel where he was staying in Kabul. He will briefly serve as Minister of Health between 2012 and 2013.
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