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Norway – Jonas Gar Stere: The profile of the next most prominent prime minister

The 61-year-old Jonas Gar Stere is probably the next Prime Minister of Of Norway, who will replace Erna Solberg as Prime Minister the ballot box showed a decisive shift of voters to the center-left.

Stere comes from a wealthy family and became the leader of the Labor Party, a party traditionally considered the political expression of the working class.

The son of a freight broker, according to the Athens News Agency, Stere is the heir to a fortune worth about $ 16 million, according to the business magazine Kapital.

His elitist background was once seen as an obstacle to his ambition to lead a party rooted in the struggle for workers’ rights.

It is the turn of the “common people”, Stere said, promising to reduce inequalities with tax breaks for low- and middle-income families, reduce the cost of public services and increase taxation for the rich, including himself.

A former foreign and health minister, Stere has led Labor since 2014, but failed in his first attempt to rise to power in 2017 as he was defeated by the conservative Solmberg alliance that secured a second term.

This time the center-left scored its biggest victory in almost three decades with the Labor Party being the largest party in parliament.

Negotiations for the formation of a coalition government

Stere, however, will have to engage in tough post-election negotiations for him formation of a coalition government with two other parties.

To form a majority government, Stere will need the support of the Center Party and the Socialist Left, which have opposing political positions on everything from oil production to taxes.

He could rule in a minority government, but with the estimate of securing 48 of the 169 seats in parliament, his government would be vulnerable.

The eight years that the Labor Party has been away from power are the longest since they first formed a government in 1928.

The party has ruled for about 50 of the 76 years since the end of World War II.

Stere: Avoiding inequalities and not living in “yellow vests”

Stere says that the class differences who noticed when he was studying in Paris in the 1980s turned him into a social democrat.

“I learned what kind of society I wanted to live in. “In France, inequalities between people are big, bigger than in Norway – between rich and poor, between those who have studied and those who do not, between the city and the countryside,” he wrote in an article for the Norwegian website. ABC News in 2017.

As he told Reuters last month, sharing the economic burden more equitably would ease the adoption of stricter climate policies – a big issue in Norway.

“MustAvoid yellow vests. “We must ensure that we reduce emissions and create jobs,” he said, referring to the anti-government ‘Yellow Vest’ movement that has emerged in France.

Norway is “good at negotiating these transitions, but we must have a society with fewer inequalities, which have increased with the previous government”.

The career of Jonas Gar Stere

He studied at one of the best universities in France, the Sciences Po, and traveled to the Soviet Union as part of a movement to support Soviet dissidents.

Upon his return home, he worked closely with the country’s first female prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundland, and later became its chief of staff at the World Health Organization.

In 2010, as foreign minister in the government of his friend Jens Stoltenberg, Stere secured the end of a 40-year conflict by signing an agreement with Russia on the demarcation of the border in the Arctic Ocean.

He then served as health minister before becoming Labor leader when Stoltenbeg was appointed head of NATO in 2014.

Stere managed to remain in Labor leadership after 2017 when the party started that year with a big lead in the polls but lost the election when he announced he would raise taxes and as the economic recovery boosted Solberg.

For the 2021 election campaign, Stere reassured middle-class voters by making it clear that only 20% of the highest paid and most wealthy would have tax increases if Labor won.

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