Interview with Marielle Leraand, president of the new party Fred og Rettferdighet (FOR, Peace and Justice), Norway

Question: Earlier you served as Deputy Chair for the left-wing party Rødt (Red) but you have since left and formed a new party, the Peace and Justice party. What motivated you to do take this step?

Marielle Leraand: At its national conference in 2023, Rødt decided to support Norwegian arms deliveries to Ukraine and thereby abandoned the international labour movement’s tradition of peace and disarmament and criticism of its own country’s imperialism. SV (the Socialist Left party), of which I was previously a member, had already abandoned this tradition when it decided to support the bombing of Libya in 2011.

The fact that the majority of the parties‘ active members voted for this at the national conference also showed that both of the traditional left-wing parties, through their long-term neglect of international solidarity, had become easy prey for NATO propaganda. We therefore decided that we must establish a new party in order to counter NATO propaganda in a way that can have a real effect.

A dozen people started an association with the aim of establishing the party in May 2023. By the end of the year, we were a few hundred people. Many of the members joined through public meetings where we had internationally renowned speakers such as Jeremy Corbyn, who came to Oslo in person, and Jeffrey Sachs, who spoke to us via video link. Throughout 2024, we succeeded in collecting over 6,000 signatures which were required to be registered as a party.

After the party was approved in January this year, we started working quickly to establish formal chapters in all counties, which is a prerequisite for being able to stand in all constituencies in the parliamentary elections. By making lots of phone calls to our existing members, as well as some people we thought we could convince to join, we managed to establish county boards and parliamentary lists everywhere within the deadline.

How has the party grown? How did you make yourselves known?

When the party was formally registered and submitted its lists, we received a lot of media attention, which meant that by the beginning of May we had over 500 members. However, the big explosion in membership numbers, to today’s 1,600, was the result of the party receiving massive media attention after we bought a week of full-coverage subway advertising in Oslo. We were able to afford this thanks to a campaign donation of 1 million NOK from concrete contractor Atle Berge, who shares our view that the conflict with Russia must be resolved through negotiations, not war. We spent the entire donation on this campaign, hoping to break through, and we succeeded. Although almost all media coverage was one-sidedly negative, bordering on outright demonization, it worked in the sense that people all over Norway became aware of the party’s existence, and independent-minded people from across the country flocked to us.

The smear campaign against the party also led to activists who ironically called themselves “anti-fascists” tearing down our posters. The campaign lasted only a few days rather than a full week. But it also meant that we only had to pay half the amount, so we now have some funds left over that we can use for the rest of the election campaign after all. At the same time, the growth in membership brought in new income, but it is clear that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

National elections are set for September 8. How would you describe the current economic and political situation?

Despite Norway’s massive increases in its military budget and extraordinary donations to the war in Ukraine, the Norwegian economy remains largely healthy in comparison to many other European nations, but municipal budgets have been tightened. This has resulted in a worsening of health care and care for the elderly as well as a record number of public school closures due to lack of funds. At the same time, inflation continues to rise as it does everywhere else. There is a marked increase in discontent among the working class, but there is no sense of crisis among the political elite. Amongst the Norwegian public, there is broad and strong opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide, and friends of Israel are becoming increasingly marginalized. Nevertheless, we are not succeeding in moving the major parties toward introducing concrete sanctions. On the other side, anti-Russian sentiment continues to be whipped up in all media, which is also having a significant impact on the population, but to a much greater extent among ethnic Norwegians than among immigrants, and to a much greater extent among the educated middle class than among the working class.

Breaking down this propaganda is the party’s main goal, but it is unrealistic that we will be able to achieve this through the election campaign, and as long as we have not succeeded, the party will not be able to become truly large. It is therefore very important that we keep our long-term goal in mind. We want to win people over to a more accurate understanding of the world, not win votes by adapting our rhetoric to the understanding of the world that most people in Norway have today.

Do any of the current parliament parties criticize the military budget?

All parties support a so-called defence agreement that involves increasing the military budget to over 3% of GDP. Recently, however, it seems that Rødt wants to break away from the agreement to increase it further to an absurd 5% of GDP. For Norway, with our high oil and gas revenues, which we use very little of, 5% of GDP is a much higher figure per capita than in any other NATO country.

This perhaps explains why your party is the only Norwegian party that supports the initiative “Not a penny, not a weapon, not a human life for war”. You already mentioned the worsening of social services and infrastructure already, do you see this trend continuing?

If the current Labour government is allowed to implement their policies, it will be a total disaster for welfare, not to mention if a Conservative government should take power. But we are hopeful that we will be able to sabotage this. Even if we end up as a mini-party in the Storting after the election, we will be there to mobilize against any cuts and to show that there is an alternative to sacrificing welfare for NATO-imperialism.

This is why the “Not a penny, not a weapon, not a human life for war” campaign is so important. This appeal perfectly sums up the principles of our party, FOR. There MAY be exceptional situations where taking up arms is necessary, and there WAS such a situation during World War II. But the Hitler analogy now being used about Putin, which has previously been used about Gaddafi, Saddam, and Milosevic, among others, is as false now as it has been every time before. The West’s war mongering and proxy wars are completely illegitimate. It is carried out solely to promote geopolitical and economic interests. While war directly destroys people, the build-up to war also means that resources that should have been used to improve people’s lives are wasted, which is also intolerable.

Will FOR participate with a delegation at the meetings in Paris on October 4–5?

Yes, see you there.

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FOR website:
https://partiet-for.no/ (Norwegian) oder https://partiet-for.no/peace-and-justice-party/ (English)

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