Det Politiske Parti (thing)

This party was founded by two of Norway's more known media clowns, Atle Antonsen and Johan Golden, a year prior to the 2001 Norwegian parliament election held on September 10th. In addition they recruited many of Norway's stand-up comedians and other media clowns to their party.

Their political manifesto was based on redefining the democracy and to turn around the political landscape which existed. They wanted to have a positive attitude to the individual, and put the individual in focus.

Their most revolutionary idea was that they would try to turn Norway's Representative Democracy into a Direct Democracy. This was to be done by having internet votes on every matter that was to be put to vote in the Norwegian parliament. They said that they would vote in parliament according to the result of their own internet poll on their website. So if they had 10 representatives in parliament, and they had a 74% result of yes in a case and 26% no on their internet poll, 7 of their representatives would vote yes and the remaining 3 would vote no. And if an internet vote went in 90% favour of a matter, the party would do nearly all they could to get the matter through.

Their symbol or icon was an open umbrella.

As the election campaign got underway, Det Politiske Parti came into focus a number of times, despite the general impression that this was not a serious party. One election county did not even accept their candidate list as they did not take them seriously. The result was that people in this county did not have the opportunity to vote for the party. The Political Party threatened with legal action on this matter and also demanded a reelection, but as of yet nothing has been done about this.

In Norway there is a tradition of having school elections in high-schools a few days before the real election, to see the political interest of those who are not old enough to vote. The results are often seen as a pointer to how the real election will go. Here Det Politiske Parti got 8% of the votes.

It should be pointed out that many of the involved, including the two founders, often pointed out that being elected to parliament would be a personal catastrophe, as they would have to quit their undoubtedly funny day(?)jobs as comedians for undoubtedly boring jobs as politicians. As luck would have it, they did not get any representatives elected, with only 0.7% of the total vote count. This was 10 times the number of votes that the communist party got, though.

It remains to be seen if Det Politiske Parti will be running in further parliament elections.