Parliamentary Elections, 8 September 2025

On 8 September 2025, Norway held parliamentary elections to select all 169 members of the Storting, its unicameral parliament. Members of Parliament serve four-year terms and are elected through a proportional representation system. To enter parliament, parties must reach at least 4 per cent of the national vote (Valgdirektoratet 2025).

The Labour Party, led by incumbent prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, won the election with 28.0 per cent of votes. In second place, the right-wing Progress Party reached a vote share of 23.8 per cent, securing 26 additional seats and giving them the greatest gains of the election. 80.12 per cent of eligible voters participated, a slight increase in voter turnout compared to 77.2 per cent in 2021 (Valgdirektoratet n.d.a). Women won approximately 40 per cent of seats (OSCE/ODIHR), down from approximately 45 per cent in the outgoing parliament (IPU n.d.) 

The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development is the leading electoral management body in charge of conducting national elections. The Ministry interprets legal rules, accredits election observers and is responsible for contingency planning at the national level. At the local level, 19 district electoral committees oversee the organization of parliamentary elections in their respective constituency. This generally entails the practicalities and logistics of recruiting election officials, setting up polling stations and vote counting. The Norwegian Directorate of Elections provides additional support for local authorities and runs the electronic election administration system (Norwegian Government 2025).

The OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) repeatedly expressed its full confidence in the Norwegian election officials. A preliminary report describes high levels of public trust and considers the law-making process to be comprehensive and inclusive, which results in broad support among stakeholders. However, given the novelty of the Election Act (see below), a delegation was sent to observe the parliamentary election with a focus on the adapted regulatory framework (OSCE/ODIHR 2025; Norwegian Government 2025).

Norwegian authorities are very aware of the threat posed by disinformation campaigns. A report had already shown inauthentic social media accounts influencing Norway’s public discourse in the context of previous elections (Analysis and Numbers et al. 2022). Ahead of the 2025 general elections, officials warned of foreign actors undermining electoral integrity (PST 2025; Regjeringen 2025). In the months leading up to election day, an analysis of online platforms found a coordinated network that disseminated disinformation around Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. Fake profiles engaged with real users and spread an anti-Støre narrative, attacking him personally and framing his government as weak and corrupt (Cyabra 2025). 

Two weeks before election day, an Ethiopian-born social worker was killed by an 18-year-old male resident of the institution where she worked. The killing was investigated as the latest in a series of far-right terrorist attacks in Norway in recent years, as the suspect had allegedly planned to commit further violence targeting a Mosque (Jupskås et al. 2025), expressed extreme-right and anti-Muslim views, and indicated that the murder was politically motivated.

Innovations

For the first time since its adoption, the 2023 Election Act was put into practice. This did not fundamentally affect the organization of the election but introduced several changes, some of which had been recommended by the OSCE ODIHR (OSCE/ODIHR 2025). The law aims to ensure the public’s confidence in elections and is written in modernized language to ensure it is accessible and easy to navigate. Most notably, the Act reforms the National Electoral Committee to better secure the independent judicial review of election appeals (Norwegian Government 2025). It also significantly expands the provisions and clarifies information on the right to appeal, ensuring greater predictability and legal certainty in the appeal process. Further, it stipulates more detailed regulation of counting and stricter requirements to secure openness in the counting process. Ballots must be counted twice, and the first count should be done at the polling station. The possibility of party list preference voting at the national level is eliminated, meaning that lists are closed and the option to remove or change the order of candidates in parliamentary elections has been removed (OSCE/ODIHR 2025; Valgdirektoratet, n.d.b). Finally, under the Election Act (§ 18.2) the election period can be extended up to one day, or postponed, in case of extraordinary conditions likely to prevent a significant proportion of voters from voting (Valgdirektoratet, n.d.b).

For the first time since its adoption, the 2023 Election Act was put into practice. This did not fundamentally affect the organization of the election but introduced several changes, some of which had been recommended by the OSCE ODIHR. Most notably, the Act reforms the National Electoral Committee to better secure the independent judicial review of election appeals. Further, the law aims to ensure the public’s confidence in elections; ballots are now required to be counted in the polling station where they were cast to ensure transparency. The new law was written in modernized language to ensure it is accessible and easy to navigate. The Act eliminates the possibility of preferential voting, (Regjeringen 2023, OSCE/ODIHR 2025; Norwegian Government 2025).