Ever since she had to hand over the reins of the Norwegian government to the Labor politician Jonas Gahr Støre in October 2021 after holding them for eight years, nothing seemed to stand in the way of the conservative politician Erna Solberg from becoming prime minister again at the end of the next legislative elections in 2025. The last local elections that were held on September 11 were a good omen: For the first time since 1924, the Høyre party, which she has led since 2004, came out ahead of Garh Støre's party.

A few days later, her victory was overshadowed by a wave of scandals that are still rattling the Norwegian political class. On July 30, the business newspaper E24 asked Solberg, 62, to make public the stock market transactions her husband, Sindre Finnes, carried out between 2013 and 2021 while she was prime minister.

On September 15, Finnes, an executive with the Federation of Norwegian Industries, finally complied. To everyone's surprise, he announced that he had carried out over 3,000 transactions for an estimated gain of 1,8 million kroner (€157,000). Some of these transactions involved state-owned companies, casting doubt on the information available to him at the time.

At a press conference, Solberg, on the verge of tears, said there had been a "breakdown of trust" in her marriage. She claimed her husband lied to her and confessed that she may have unknowingly been guilty of conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, she refused to resign and promised to hire a "babysitter" to supervise her husband's financial transactions if she became prime minister again in 2025.

For Norwegians, these revelations came as a shock. Trust in politicians has been traditionally high in the Scandinavian kingdom. But "there's a very thin line between trust and naivety," remarked Kim Arne Hammerstad, the author of the book Politiske Skandaler ("Political Scandals," 2020). The journalist sees in this series of revelations the fruit of serious investigations carried out by the Norwegian media, which in recent years have chosen the path of investigative journalism.

This string of revelations began in mid-summer and first impacted the ruling majority. On July 21, E24 journalists established that in January, Minister of Research and Higher Education Ola Borten Moe, number two in the Center Party, had bought 400,000 kronor's worth of shares in the state-owned company Kongsberg Gruppen, which holds a 25% share in the munitions producer Nammo, a week before the government approved a multi-billion-kronor contract with Nammo. The minister tendered his resignation. He was not the first to do so.

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