By a commentator for Tjen Folket Media
Municipal and county elections were held on September 9. The election circus is over once again and the votes have been counted. According to NRK, 35% of over four million enfranchised voters in Norway chose not to vote. Additionally, they report that up to 22,600 blank votes were counter. This clearly shows the masses’ disdain for the politicians and their distrust of the bourgeois state.
Additionally, the largest parties have suffered a powerful defeat in what many have called an election fiasco. People have lost their trust and faith in the largest parties. Several smaller parties experienced advances in the counts. None of the parliamentary parties can or will make any comprehensive societal changes. Real change demands an upheaval of the entire society, a revolution, and a new state where the people rule themselves: a worker’s state.
Time will show this for the people, and one should not look away from the fact that participation in elections will sink within the next municipal and county elections. This is an experience that the masses of people will appropriate for themselves when they see that both small and new parties betray their promises to the very same degree that the large and old parties have.
In Norway, we talk about voting being a civic duty, and “couch potatoes” are viewed with disdain. But the root of the problem does not lie with those who do not vote, but with politicians and the entire rotten political system. Promises after promises are broken again and again. That people become alienated is a natural consequence of this.
Simply abstaining from voting does very little in and of itself. It is absolutely necessary that people organize themselves – organize themselves in the struggle for the new power. But the low election turnouts show that the election is illegitimate, as much now as it has before. It shows that very many people do not have trust in the state and the system because they do not represent the broad masses of people.
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