Norway’s Red Party Capitulates to Imperialism - Left Voice
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Last year, Jacobin magazine deemed the Norwegian left party Rødt to be a “working-class alternative.” This radical left party appears to have cracked the code for mainstream appeal. Looking under the hood, however, reveals that Rødt’s electoral gains have come at the expense of socialist integrity and principles.

The most important party on the Norwegian Left, Rødt, is gaining strength in the polls, while generating enthusiasm in leftist circles internationally. Pollsters have noted the parallel rise of Rødt and of Norway’s Far Right, a phenomenon they attribute to increased political polarization. This is rare in a wealthy social democratic country where the same establishment parties have dominated the elections since its inception. Looking more closely at Rødt’s political evolution, however, does not reveal a radicalization to the left. Rather, the party is increasingly moving in the opposite direction.

The defining moment in its rightward trajectory was the events at its national congress in April 2023 when the question of weapons deliveries to Ukraine was on the voting agenda. The party had faced heavy criticism and media frenzy due to its opposition to deliveries of Norwegian weapons. Rødt had clutched at a parliamentary resolution from 1959 which constrained the export of arms to war zones — but cracks had begun to appear. Rødt’s elected parliamentarians and leaders began arguing against this policy. Ultimately, they got their way when 60 percent of delegates voted yes to weapon deliveries to Ukraine. Rødt had broken with its historical principles and accommodated imperialism, but this did not lead to any major splits.

Two years later, the Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, voted unanimously for a long-term rearmament package, which includes additional military expenditure of $62.6 billion for the next decade. Rødt’s representatives also voted for this bill. In contrast to what some pro-NATO leftists claim, the arming of the pro-Israeli Zelenskyy regime is inextricably linked to the arming of the imperialist countries. In addition, Rødt also voted for an economic-military support package to Ukraine at a cost of $8,7 billion.

In the parliamentary elections of September 2025 Rødt achieved its highest election result so far on the national level. With 5.3 percent of the votes and nine elected seats, it could no longer be ignored by the social democratic Norwegian Labour Party, one of the largest institutional parties in the country. In November 2025, Rødt, together with the Labour party and the Centre party, reached a budget agreement. The circle was complete: The deliveries of arms to Ukraine paved the way for rearmament, which in turn got Rødt invited into the polite society of fiscal discipline.

This complete capitulation to imperialist militarization and rearmament did not have much negative impact on Rødt. However, this step was too much to bear for the International Socialists, a group connected to the International Socialist Tendency (IST). It left in 2025 after being a part of Rødt since 2007.

Maoist Origins

Rødt’s degeneration might be explained by many factors, but the root cause lies in its origins. The party is essentially the successor of the Red Electoral Alliance that was launched by a Maoist group, the Workers Communist Party (AKP). Although the AKP has ceased to exist, its ideological legacy and influence are still present, consciously or unconsciously, in Rødt. Ever since its foundation, Rødt has avoided a real break with Maoism-Stalinism, in order to preserve the unity of the party.

The end result was a program of a contradictory character. On one hand, Rødt proclaims that it wants a classless society, and even defines this society as communism. It advocates for the working class to take power and democratize the economy. Rødt also confirms that the state maintains the capitalist system through its institutions. In addition, the party wants Norway out of NATO and considers itself an anti-imperialist party. On the other hand, however, it calls for rebuilding “Norway’s national defence capability.” It fights for a so-called “Socialism for the 21st century,” and in the chapter named “A democratic revolution,” Rødt’s program states the following,

For the working people to have power, a radical change in the power relations is needed — a socialist revolution. We in Rødt want the revolution to be democratically based and to happen peacefully. This requires that the trade union movement and other large popular organizations put the issue on the agenda and that a large majority of the population support the changes The views of the popular majority will be expressed in political actions and struggles, in elections and in other ways before a major upheaval, and this will change the political composition of elected bodies. The process may also lead to the creation of new democratic governing bodies.

Thus, according to Rødt, the socialist revolution is when socialists win a majority in parliament backed by an intensification of political struggles. “New democratic governing bodies,” i.e., workers councils or soviets, might arise. In other words, there is no soviet strategy, and the bourgeois state remains almost untouched. This is quite similar to the strategy advocated by Karl Kautsky in the German Social Democracy before 1914, where a fundamentally reformist concept gets some radical-sounding window dressing.

Although Rødt keeps on repeating that the state is the guardian of bourgeois relations of production, its strategy boils down to changing the balance of power, as if the class character of the state could be transformed by internal shifts.

A Pro-NATO Party in Practice

This lack of a socialist strategy naturally gave rise to a social democratic wing which controls the leadership today. This wing wants to revive the postwar social democratic consensus, and also fights for the removal of the term “Communism” from the program. However, the most vocal defenders of arms shipments to Ukraine is a wing of the old AKP Maoist segment, who also are the most avid advocates of a strong national defence. It seems that their views on the Russo-Ukrainian war is a mutated continuation of Mao’s designation of the Soviet Union as “social imperialism.”

Thus Rødt’s view of the bourgeois state as a neutral entity, and the relative strength of Maoist and social democratic viewpoints, have transformed Rødt into a pro-NATO party in practice. State politics, and not class politics, dominate.

There is no organized left opposition in Rødt, but there are a lot of members who oppose the rightward drift of the party. The disorganized left wing lacks political clarity and strategy, tending to celebrate the likes of Zohran Mamdani and Jeremy Corbyn. There is also a sort of “organizational fetishism,” as Ernest Mandel would have put it, where the preservation of the party’s unity trumps all political questions.

A positive development on the Norwegian left is the increasing opposition that is forming inside the Red Youth, Rødt’s youth group, who will need not just an opposition to militarism, but a revolutionary socialist strategy — but that is a story for another article.

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