ARENDAL, Norway — On a blazing mid-August afternoon in this southern city, a line of white sailboats flying multicolored streamers and national flags floated densely packed in the harbor. On the deck of a sleek white wooden vessel, two politicians mounted on a platform sat squinting against the sun, fixing their microphones and sipping water. Along the boat’s hull, a hanging blue banner proclaimed Demokratibåten, or “The Democracy Boat,” in looping script.
The next boat over hosted their audience: Crammed into rows of portside-facing benches, dozens of citizens in sunglasses and summer clothes gazed over the two hulls. Gathered onshore behind both boats, hundreds more spectators sat on dock steps and town plaza benches, sipping coffee and licking ice cream cones as they settled in for a debate about polarization in Norwegian politics. Over the next four days, The Democracy Boat would also host youth activists, mayors, writers, a bishop and more to discuss topics from climate anxiety to drug reform, housing and declining birth rates.
This is what democracy looks like in Norway. Or at least during “Arendal Week” (Arendalsuka), its so-called democracy festival that temporarily triples the population of this coastal city to about 150,000. The Democracy Boat is just one venue of hundreds. Every August since 2012, politicians, businesspeople, policymakers, nonprofits and ordinary citizens from around the country have filled local boats, tents, auditoriums, bars and restaurants for more than 2,300 free public events over five long days.
This year, Arendal Week fell just three weeks before a national election. And it promised to be a tense one. The ruling Labor Party was still recovering from a January government collapse triggered by its unpopular EU-aligned energy policy. This past year, the opposing far-right Progress Party had been steadily surging. Still, in a small country that shares a border with Russia and largely relies on the United States for its defense, the focus of many discussions turned global: President Donald Trump, the Ukraine war, Palestine. In the shadow of a shifting world order, Norway’s leaders were turning a worried eye abroad.
For an outsider like me, it was an opportunity to look in—at what felt like an extremely Norwegian phenomenon. Nestled under the shadow of a spired 12th-century hilltop church, Arendal city center crowds three shores of a small peninsula with white wooden structures facing boat-crammed docks. Walking down the crowded stone streets, breathing salty air laced with scents of grilled fish and coffee, it was tempting to consider the whole affair quaint. After all, this is the city after which Disney named its fictional Nordic kingdom in “Frozen.” (That it’s spelled “Arendelle” in the film doesn’t seem to help stem the steady flow of American tourists who travel here to sing “Let It Go.”)
Still, the Frozen parallel felt oddly apt. Even as I marveled at the openness and civility of the events, the shininess of it all began to resemble some kind of Disney-democracy. Because just behind this model-nation image lurks Norway’s paradox: Its progressive social democracy is built on a still-relentless fossil fuels exploration and extraction agenda. And most people in attendance—not to mention the country’s entire 5.5 million population—count on ending their careers with a cushy pension supported by a $2 trillion oil fund.
The week’s events spoke to larger questions: Does Norway’s democracy festival offer lessons in a civilized political approach? Or is its oil-funded, pro-renewables progressivism a singular paradox ill-advised to imitate? Many Norwegians, I found, are well aware of their nation’s contradictions; a few of the week’s most interesting moments came in acts of public dissent. And on September 8, when they cast their national ballots, Norwegians showed the world that this cognitive dissonance is far from reconciled.
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To an American, the concept of a national “democracy festival” may sound like an impossible dream. From a security standpoint alone, the idea of gathering major politicians across the political spectrum into a single space for a week of free and open events seems ludicrous. Security considerations aside, it’s hard to imagine such a civil party-spanning mingling. But in Nordic countries, and a growing number of nations, it’s a cornerstone of politics.
The concept began in 1968 on the Swedish island of Gotberg, when Sweden’s then-education minister and later Prime Minister Olof Palme invited the public to participate in the Social Democrat Party’s annual summer meetings. The event soon grew to festival-sized proportions. Throughout the mid-2000s, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland adopted Sweden’s model. (In 2018, Arendal Week surpassed its Swedish inspiration in size and is now the world’s largest.) More recently, five more small northern European countries have also followed suit.
According to the “Democracy Festivals Association,” which unites the events around the world, such gatherings aim to “revitalize democracy by connecting the political system with citizens and their organizations, enhancing dialogue and participation, and ensuring access to core political discussions and actors across resource differences.”
Logistically, such an event simply works better in a country with a population somewhere between those of Los Angeles and New York. Arendal is about four hours by bus from Oslo, which is home to both parliament and nearly half of Norway’s population. For many prominent figures, riding the train or bus with members of the public is a free boost to an “everyman” image.
But what, exactly, is a Norwegian everyman? Norway is one of the world’s wealthiest nations, which may help explain why the events better resembled a swanky regatta weekend than a scrappy summit for democracy advocates. Wandering around town, I walked in a sea of mostly white, from the skin tones to the linen suits and shining yachts, where fiery debates were followed by flowing champagne. The crowds were packed, the events ran simultaneously along a tight schedule and nearly all offered some kind of free food and drink. (The various happenings, it should be noted, are not permitted to be commercial in nature, and organizers aren’t allowed to recruit or fundraise. All leftover food is donated to local nonprofits.)
Even so, the vision is admirable. By design, the free-and-open model attempts to break down the elitism of access politics, offering a space for most citizens to actually reach the powerful. And I did see humanitarian and activist groups as frequently as I saw industry interests. In Norway, leaders call Arendal Week a “dance floor of democracy,” or a place where access to decisionmakers is temporarily levelled.
But even in a small, currently center-left country like Norway, research suggests that not everyone gets a dance. In a 2022 study, Norwegian sociologists surveyed Arendal Week event organizers before and after the events and at the end of the year, comparing interest group resources with results produced from targeted decisionmakers. Rather than helping transcend resource differences, the researchers found, the outcomes of the week’s events tended to replicate and reinforce existing divides.
“Although an informal setting lowers the threshold of contact, attention is still a scarce resource,” the authors wrote. “Even though the democracy festival under study actively tries to reduce bias, the dominance of the financially and professionally strongest actors prevails.”
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On the afternoon of the second day, I strolled across a gangway that sliced a shortcut through an inner section of the harbor to the opposite shore. On either side, people gathered on the decks of gleaming banner-flying boats, drinking and chatting. Aboard these smaller craft representing business and other organizational interests, I gleaned, entry was strictly invitation-only.
The way was narrow and crowded. I saw a harried-looking woman pushing a two-child stroller, apologizing and pleading for space. As I leaned against the side of a yacht whose banner read “Sustainable Energy,” a balding man onboard ruefully smiled and invited me to step up for a minute to clear the way.
When I introduced myself as a climate journalist, his face opened and he whirred into motion. In a matter of moments, I was sitting on a sun-hot white leather seat and he was pouring cremant into a plastic flute. Offering me bacalao made from Norwegian skrei, he launched into an enthused pitch about his southern Norway-based company, Sustainable Energy AS. Since 2017, he said, it has been providing infrastructure for green energy, offshore wind and carbon capture companies to test early versions of their technologies. (“Like Airbnb: We have the space available to be made and reused many, many times,” he said.) Clearly, he hoped I’d be interested enough to write about them.
After a few minutes discussing the company, I asked him about Arendal Week. He told me that this boat is here every year. Since its inception, the government has sponsored his company as one of five designated national “Catapult Centers,” a federal initiative to support innovation in promising fields. But he knows the company can’t take that backing for granted. So every August in Arendal, he and his colleagues come here to remind politicians of their promises to keep Norway a renewables leader.
“We show up and do the whole parade,” he said with a wide-sweeping arm motion, the creamy contents of his glass sloshing. “This is how you play the game.”
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Later the same afternoon, I posted a photo to my Instagram story of a line of boats flying a wide array of political party banners. I found the image charming. A few minutes later, I saw a comment from one of my Norwegian friends in my base Tromsø who clearly didn’t agree.
“Absolutely disgusting,” he wrote.
Later, he elaborated: Arendal Week was a symbol of the excesses of Norway’s oil-insatiable powers. On top of that, he said, its location on the Norwegian southern tip only emphasized Oslo’s seeming ignorance of its own north, which accounts for half the country’s geography.
“Norway has the largest wealth fund in the world,” he said. “We don’t need more oil. We’re one of the few countries that can afford to be bold.”
Since 1969, when Phillips Petroleum struck it rich on Norway’s continental shelf, oil wealth has transformed society. This year, a runaway bestseller reckoned with the consequences. In Landet Som Ble for Rikt, or The Country that Became Too Rich, the Norwegianeconomist Martin Bech Holte excoriates fellow citizens as the spoiled children of industry giants.The book’s cover art depicts a solid black map of Norway dripping oil.
Inside, Holte paints a picture of a country suffering from bloated public spending and stagnated innovation. Norway spends the most of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on education besides Luxembourg, he says, yet standardized test scores are falling. Thanks to their generous social safety net, Norwegians take the highest number of sick leave days in the world and all citizens count on a generous pension payout at the end of their careers. Yet by many metrics, Norway’s economy is slowing.
“There is no ambition and that is 100 percent because of the oil fund,” he writes. “We’ve become heirs, been given six times our annual salary in the bank and that means we can take the easy way out.”
The book stirred something in the Norwegian consciousness. But that doesn’t mean Norwegians are willing to pay more for energy, as revealed by this year’s government crisis. Since the Labor Party won government control in 2021, Prime Minister Støre has strengthened Norwegian “interconnections” with Britain and mainland Europe. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, prompting a European boycott of Russian energy, Norway was suddenly promoted to the continent’s biggest energy supplier, and now provides a third of Europe’s natural gas alone.
The sheer scale of this new European energy dependence created domestic shortages in a country that technically produces a surplus. On top of that, Norway’s “interconnectivity” policies have imported Europe’s energy price volatility to Norwegian households. (Technically, the price surges affect only southern Norway, where the vast majority of Norwegians live. Up where I live in the north, we still have our own system and pay comparatively less for energy.) Finally, adding insult to injury, Norway isn’t even in the European Union, yet has signed on to many of its economic policies. In January, the Eurosceptic Centre Party left the government coalition in protest against complying with new EU energy directives.
For about a week, a crisis reigned. Then Prime Minister Støre pulled a rabbit out of a hat by appointing Jens Stoltenberg, the overwhelmingly popular former two-time prime minister and NATO leader, as his finance minister. Dubbed the “Stoltenback” moment, it triggered a huge surge in public confidence and Støre’s government restabilized. (Many Norwegians have said the move was as explosive as if Barack Obama had agreed to return as President Joe Biden’s secretary of state. Given current American politics, I doubt even that would be as unifying as Stoltenback.)
Still, Stoltenberg couldn’t save his government from yet another recent controversy. Even without oil profits, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund would still be growing, thanks to a diverse portfolio of investments in more than 8,000 global companies. In July, the major Norwegian paper Aftenposten highlighted one in particular: An Israeli fighter jet company. After weeks of outrage expressed by the largely pro-Palestine populace, on August 15 (during Arendalsuka), Norway made global headlines by announcing major divestments from Israeli projects.
Just a day later, as I crossed a busy square in Arendal, I saw commotion across the street. Looking closer, I realized it was Stoltenberg himself, decked by security personnel and tailed by shouting protesters. As it turns out, despite the extensive positive coverage, Norway had in fact pulled only 11 of its 61 investments from Israeli companies. To the protestors, their state’s action was a mere publicity ploy that quietly maintained strategic ties in its own interests.
Many government critics believe the move paralleled the aggressive fossil fuels extraction campaign quietly funding Norway’s impressive domestic renewables portfolio. The country often seems to stand on the right side of history, but taken as a whole, its decisions tend to reflect a colder calculus.
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Near the southern end of Arendal city center stood an enormous smoke-puffing lavvo, the traditional Sami round tent. Among Arendal Week’s hundreds of stands and venues, it was the sole space devoted to northern issues. (“It feels a bit on the nose, don’t you think?” a northern Norwegian friend said when we first spotted the large canvas structure from a distance.)
Still, stepping inside the lavvo did feel like a portal to the north: Immediately, the scent of smoke and reindeer overwhelmed. In its dim center, a fire crackled, surrounded by tree stumps and long wooden benches decked with reindeer pelts. At the back of the tent, chefs from the Sami-run NOMAD Indigenous Food Lab stood at a high counter preparing reindeer stew and other traditional foods.
The lavvo had brought me to Arendal Week; I helped organize and participated in one of its panels with the Arendal-based environmental nonprofit GRID. In a talk titled “Sources of Truth,” I sat around the fire with Jan-Gunnar Winther, a climate scientist and current director of the Center for Oceans and the Arctic and Anders Oskal, Secretary General of World Reindeer Herders. Together, we discussed two Arctic issues at risk of being sidelined in the current geopolitical debate: climate change and Indigenous rights.
On Monday, Winther had joined a program-headlining panel about accelerating Arctic geopolitical tension, a talk that largely covered the Russian threat and Trump’s interest in Greenland. To our much-smaller audience, he expressed concern that narratives of High North militarization were overshadowing the existential threat of climate change. Yet climate change is one of the primary movers of the current geopolitical era, he said, and will continue to fuel instability around the world.
Oskal described how Sami people in Norway are hit by climate change twice: first by the rapid changes to their environment and then again by the state renewable projects planned to help combat it. Norway’s ambitious renewables agenda echoes the patterns of its oil-extracting commitments, he said. Both prioritize industry over humanity, placing short-term profits over long-term survival and even international human rights law. He pointed to the now-famous Fosen case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a state-approved wind farm built on reindeer territory was unconstitutional because it violated ILO 169, a UN human rights treaty that protects Indigenous rights. He compared it to the state’s more recent decision to electrify one of Norway’s biggest liquified natural gas power plants in the north. It will help Norway reach its Paris climate goals. It also will require building even more wind farms through Sami territory.
“Norwegians like to look down their nose at the human rights abuses under Trump,” Oskal said. “But they are reluctant to look at themselves.”
Winther agreed that the true threats coming to Norway—accelerated by Oslo-based decisionmakers’ doubling down on fossil fuels—tend to be consistently underestimated by the same people who have the power to stop them. Even he wouldn’t have believed it, he added, unless he had already witnessed it firsthand.
“Forty years ago, crawling on my hands and knees to measure the reflectivity of a glacier, I never could have guessed what kind of transformations would occur in my lifetime,” Winther said, his voice beginning to break. He paused, quietly apologized for becoming emotional, and turned to face Oskal.
“The changes in Finnmark, to Sapmi, to your traditional way of life…it’s devastating.”
* * *
On September 8, 2025, Norwegians cast their ballots. For many, the results were a relief: The far-right Progress Party may have doubled its number of seats, but the ruling center-left Labor Party stayed firmly in control.
Some took the development as a sign of increasing polarization, since the far-left Red Party also enjoyed large gains. Still, the sheer diversity of parliamentary representation was also lauded as democracy at work: Labor will now have to compromise with four smaller parties to move policy forward. (This mish-mash coalition was soon dubbed “the Tutti Frutti government,” after a multicolored Norwegian candy.)
“It’s a good result. It’s a clear result. It demonstrates that center-left social democrats can win elections even when there are winds blowing from the right,” Støre said the next day, Reuters reported.
In the north, post-election feelings are more mixed. The existing government voted in favor of one of the least-popular projects in northern memory, after all, the electrification of a far north liquefied natural power plant, which will both likely displace Sami reindeer herders and drive up local energy prices. To pacify those concerned about Norway’s EU energy commitments, the government will impose new taxes to help offset the high energy costs in the south. In a recent editorial, High North News Editor-in-Chief Arne Holm expounded against the election’s southern-biased outcomes.
“No one, absolutely no one in the north, will benefit from the electricity subsidy,” he wrote. “Yet we contribute to jacuzzis and heated driveways in the south through our tax bill.”
Holm’s editorial connected the issue to what he sees as a larger and more troubling bias, that Norway doesn’t seem to be taking Arctic security risks as seriously as the rest of the world does.
“The Norwegian parliamentary election of 2025 will go down as the election in which half of Norway was ignored and forgotten,” he wrote. He added that “in an election year in which the geopolitical situation in the Arctic is on everyone else’s radar,” Norway’s failure to see its exposure along a 123-mile-long border shared with Russia moves “past ignorance and into the realm of irresponsibility.”
“Measured against the lack of total preparedness and civil communities unable to stand against an attack from Russia, the amount of political analyses of the situation in the north becomes vanishingly small,” he said. “Disturbingly small.”
Norway’s role in the global energy supply continues to loom large, however. Just days after Arendal Week wrapped up, Greta Thunberg and 200 fellow Last Generation protestors arrived at an industrial site called Mongstad to block the operations of Norway’s largest oil refinery. Every day for the three weeks leading up to the election, they pleaded with the government to halt extraction or at least come up with a clear plan for a future fossil fuel phaseout.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Prime Minister Støre doubled down. “Norway should continue to explore for oil and gas and remain a reliable energy supplier to Europe,” he said in his September 9 victory speech.
In Norway, then, democracy is just as alive as the oil industry that funds it. And as long as these social democrats keep the oil flowing, so too will flow the champagne.
Top photo: “The Democracy Boat” in Arendal Harbor, one of hundreds of venues hosting discussions and debates during Norway’s democracy festival.
