Johan Sverdrup - Sverdrup's Government

Sverdrup's Government

It turned out from the first day that Sverdrup as a Prime Minister was not the competent strategist that most Norwegians had either learned to fear or admire. He expected his adherents to follow him as they had done for almost 30 years. It also turns out that Venstre was a more loosely knit coalition than Sverdrup and the other leaders had expected. The fight against the powerful executive branch had created alliances that broke very quickly afterwards. Sverdrup and all his ministers belonged to the conservative faction of the party. They had strong support what the leading Norwegian sociologist, Stein Rokkan, labeled the periphery, adherents of lay Christianity in opposition to the clergy, adherents of the so called New Norwegian in opposition to the Norwegian spoken in the cities, adherents of totalitarianism.

His great mistake was to refuse to include anyone from the radical faction and to further alienate them by not accepting their advice in any of the difficult political situations that arose in those years. In the 1885 general election the party's slogan was "Have confidence in Johan Sverdrup" which later has been deemed one of the most ridiculous slogans ever created. A party without ability to find anything to unite about will have no long life, and the breach in the party became evident throughout the three years before the next general elections.

Sverdrup and his colleagues and diminishing group in the Storting were more or less expelled from the party and had to start their own Venstre. The original party, now led by Sverdrup's leading opponents, Ullmann and Steen, voted against him and mocked the old man for clinging to the "Chair", but he was saved by Høyre who had no intentions to diminish the strife within the earlier almighty Venstre, and believed that their best hope was to leave the Sverdrup ministry in peace until the general elections in 1888. After those elections, which proved fully that Høyres strategy had been a sound one, Sverdrup's Ministry was quickly ousted.