As a lesson in democracy, Norway holds nationwide pretend elections in all its high schools. The results are unreliable - when I participated in, hm, 1995, all the high schools in my area were swayed by a powerful Christian People's Party wind - all thanks to one very bright kid my age with a politicians gene, obviously meant for greater things, who had no problem twirling the dull, grown up representatives of the other parties around his little finger in the party debates. (Today he's an advisor to the Minister of Foreign Aid.) This, of course, has not translated into Christian People's Party support in real elections.

Those who claim to know about such things say that school elections are much more polarized than the real ones, with clearer left-right splits, but that on the whole they may still indicate future changes in real elections. If so, this week's school election was good news for the Progress Party:

The Progress Party also emerged with 26 percent of the vote in the school elections, while a party at the other end of the political spectrum, the Socialist Left (SV) grabbed the next-largest bloc of votes at 21.3 percent. It's not unusual for the country's more extremist parties to do well in school elections. Frp's margin, however, was noteworthy, leading some commentators to call it "the youth's party." Its share of the vote shot up a full 12 percentage points over the last school elections that were held before the national election in 2001. At that time, Frp captured 14.1 percent of the vote. SV, meanwhile, fell back, from 23.5 percent of the vote in 2001. It fared well in Oslo, however, where it won the most votes of all other parties.

When I was in high school, supporting the Progress Party was something of a stigma - I still remember being schocked when a friend of mine expressed sympathy. It should be safe to say that a near doubling of youth support for the Progress Party indicate

Huh! Well, I am really surprised. That's what I get for reading Aftenposten. Aftenposten had led me to believe that the Progress Party was doomed. Aftenposten's English page made a big deal out of that punch that got thrown, by a Progress Party candidate, at a highschool-sposored debate. Then there was attack by Jagland (also covered on the English page) in which he called Hagen a "menace to democracy". An Aftenposten reader could be excused for coming to the conclusion that the Progress Party was doomed. But I wasn't reading the polls. The polls have, I guess, been tracking a rise in popularity for the Progress Party. Bjørn, what is it, do you think, that draws people to the Progress Party? Is it anti-immigrant sentiment? Or is it something more positive? Why this surge in popularity?

- Gill

Martin Schanke's _slap_ (not a punch) probably meant more to the pundits, who finally something interesting to write about, than it did to the voters.

Not sure what draws other people to the Progress Party, but it's not racism or xenophobia. To the extent immigration is a factor, it's about the backsides of it, crime and the failure of integration, not "dirty foreigners stealing our jobs".

Well, Bjørn, I am not so sure I fully agree with you. I think a many (but not a majority) of the voters are drawn to the Progress Party because of various levels of xenophobia and racism. The party sometimes flirts pretty openly with such elements, especially on the local level.

You may remember I blogged an example some time back.

http://blogs.salon.com/0001561/2003/08/08.html#a3176

Carl I Hagen refused to condenm the letter, just said something about the wording being "unfortunate."

I think you should clue in your American readers to this strange phenomenon in Nordic countries (I know it's also practiced in Germany, but is it also in the rest of Europe?) where the active political parties of the nation have "youth divisions" which seek to recruit young members to their party platform... - in high schools. This kind of politicking is unheard of in the US.

Imagine, Americans, if elections for the president of a high school student body were conducted under national political party guidance. Imagine having a high school student body Democratic Party candidate, and a Republican and/or a Green Party candidate. Imagine our political parties spending time and money for such elections. Well, this is normal conduct in high schools up north in Europe.

The idea is twofold: to teach high schoolers about democratic participation, but also, - quite openly - to recruit young voters to the platform of a national political party, BEFORE they have the right to vote.

In my opinion, it is no wonder that Nordic countries become so socially stratified, without much movement between socio-economic classes. The idea of easy cross-over between political parties doesn't come easily after such early political indoctrination.

In the long run, high school politics is all about popularity contests. This has rarely anything to do with national politics, and everything to do with emerging teenage sexuality. To subject high schoolers to such travesties is, in my mind, just absurd. In that way, I'm certainly glad that I wound up spending my teenage years in a high school in suburban New Jersey (as opposed to a Finnish high school), where our greatest political influence came from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, instead of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I learned much more from the former two, - the latter two never left much of an impression at all.

Markku: Don't confuse school elections with youth parties. School elections, (which I think is a very good idea), are mock elections, nobody is elected for anything, and participants in debates are more often grown up local politicians than members of youth parties, and they're only rarely actual students at the school. Parties are not involved in elections of student bodies.

I'm confused by your claim that the US doesn't have youth wings of their parties. A quick search turns up both the Young Democrats of America and the Young Republican National Federation. Surely these are equivalents?

Thanks for the clarification. I guess I'm reacting more to what I remember as the role of youth divisions in Finnish high schools in the seventies, which I always felt was quite bizarre whenever I visited Finland on summer vacations and learned about them from my friends and relatives. I hope that things are in Finland as you describe them today in Norway; they certainly were not that way thirty years ago.

In the late sixties and early seventies, there was a very energetic leftwing youth movement in Finland who totally espoused the vision of Taisto Sinisalo, the head of the Finnish Communist Party, who wanted Finland to voluntarily join the Soviet Union as a new Soviet Republic. With that in mind, he and his cadres - called taistolaiset - tried to politicize and prepare the young people in Finnish high schools for that blessed day, often using the Young Pioneers as a model.

Of course, there was strong opposition against the taistolaiset (most significantly from the Social Democrats), and pretty soon all of the political parties in Finland were creating youth division, to try to win over the hearts and minds of high schoolers. I remember reading some of the literature generated from this contest, as most of these books were being sold right before the start of the school season in the fall. While the left wing were quite predictable, I remember being taken aback by the clumsy showing of the Conservative Party: there was a stick drawing of a smiling kid with a balloon which said: "Be A Bourgeois".

I think there is still a vestige of all this politicking in Scandinavia high schools, though I'd imagine that it isn't as vehement as way back then.

As to the Young Republicans and Young Democrats, yes, they are youth divisions, but they don't operate within high schools on a local level as much as outside schools on a national level. And, when I was in high school, everyone pretty much dismissed these people as geeks who couldn't think for themselves.

Markku: What you describes may have been unique to Finland - we did not have a similar pro-Soviet movement, (our communists were pro-Mao, and their movement was centered in universities, not afaik high schools).

"As to the Young Republicans and Young Democrats, yes, they are youth divisions, but they don't operate within high schools on a local level as much as outside schools on a national level. And, when I was in high school, everyone pretty much dismissed these people as geeks who couldn't think for themselves."

Lol - sounds like our own youth parties. The scary thing is that they _are_ important, as they really do educate (indoctrinate more like it) the "leaders of tomorrow".

i dont agree with you at all. what you said is totally not what i view it as.
-jill

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