Jens Stoltenberg

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Jens Stoltenberg, 2019Jens Stoltenberg signature.svg

Jens Stoltenberg (born March 16, 1959 in Oslo ) is a Norwegian politician from the social democratic Arbeiderpartiet (Ap). He was Minister of State in the Stoltenberg I government from March 2000 to October 2001 and Minister of State in the Stoltenberg II government from October 2005 to October 2013 . Between 1991 and 2014 he was a member of parliament in the Storting , from 2002 to 2014 he headed the Arbeiderpartiet party.

On March 28, 2014, Stoltenberg was appointed Secretary General of NATO effective October 1, 2014 . After his term of office, he is to take over the post of head of Norway's central bank , Norges Bank .

Life

Jens Stoltenberg is a son of Norwegian politicians Thorvald Stoltenberg and Karin Stoltenberg (née Heiberg). He has two sisters, Nini and Camilla . Nini, who was a drug addict as a young adult, died in 2014 after a long illness. His maternal aunt is the Middle East expert Marianne Heiberg , who was married to Minister Johan Jørgen Holst . From 1961 to 1964 he lived in Serbia , as his father worked as a diplomat in the Norwegian embassy in Yugoslavia . His parents had a serious car accident there and Jens Stoltenberg was infected with staphylococci by his mother after her return from the hospital and became seriously ill as a result.

After attending the Rudolf Steiner School and the prestigious Oslo katedralskole , he studied economics at the University of Oslo until 1987 . Between 1979 and 1981 he worked part-time as a journalist at Norway 's Arbeiderbladet . From 1989 to 1990, Stoltenberg worked as a consultant at the statistical agency Statistisk sentralbyrå (SSB) and as a lecturer in social economics at the University of Oslo.

Stoltenberg has been married to diplomat Ingrid Schulerud since 1987 and has two children. He is not a member of the Church of Norway or any other denomination, but he does not identify as an atheist either .

Political career

In the years 1979-1989 Stoltenberg was a board member in the youth organization of the workers' party Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF). From 1985 to 1989 he was the Chairman and Vice-President of the Socialist Youth International (IUSY). From 1985 he was also a member of the board of the Labor Party, from which he only left in 2014. Stoltenberg was leader of the Labor Party in Oslo from 1990 to 1992. During his time in the AUF he was active against NATO , among other things .

In 2000 it became known that Stoltenberg had been in contact with employees of the Soviet embassy in Oslo since the late 1970s. Among them was the KGB agent Boris Kirillov, with whom he met frequently in the second half of the 1980s. Kirillov's assignment was to recruit Norwegians as agents. Stoltenberg got an entry in the KGB files codenamed Steklov . Stoltenberg himself said he knew that Kirillov was probably an agent and that he also had no state secrets to tell at the time.

From 1990 to 1992 he worked as State Secretary on a Defense Commission tasked with examining the role of the Norwegian military after the collapse of the former Soviet Union . In 1989, Jens Stoltenberg stood in the Norwegian parliamentary elections, but initially he did not gain a direct mandate, instead becoming a so-called Vararepresentant . As such, he moved from 1991 for the then Minister Bjørn Tore Godal in Parliament, the Storting , after. From 1991 to 1993 he was a member of the social committee. In the 1993 election, he was elected a permanent member of the Norwegian Parliament for the Labor Party. He represented the constituency of Oslo.

Minister (1993–1997)

From 1990 Stoltenberg was repeatedly a member of the Norwegian government, initially until 1991 as State Secretary in the Ministry of Environmental Protection. In 1992, when Gro Harlem Brundtland retired from the Ap party chair, she wished that Stoltenberg would succeed her. However, Stoltenberg decided against it and did not stand as a candidate for the election of the new chairman. Instead, Thorbjørn Jagland became the new chairman.

From 1993 to 1997 he was a member of the Brundtland III government and then of the Jagland government . He was his country's economy and energy minister until 1996, then finance minister until 1997 . During his time as a minister, he had to give up his mandate in the Storting and was represented there by party colleagues. After the change of government in 1997, when Kjell Magne Bondevik formed a conservative government, he returned to parliament as an MP. There he headed the Energy and Environment Committee until February 2000.

prime minister

Stoltenberg at a Nordic Council meeting , 2006

First term (2000–2001)

In March 2000, Stoltenberg became the new prime minister during the ongoing legislature after Bondevik failed to win a vote of confidence . During his tenure, he tried above all to push through an administrative reform. This led to reform of hospitals, police, and defense, as well as new VAT regulations . In addition, a regulation was introduced during his time that the state revenue from the Norwegian oil business must flow into the state pension fund . However, most of these reforms that have been attempted have not been well received by the population. With the defeat of the Social Democrats in the 2001 election , he lost his government position and Bondevik returned to office.

leadership dispute in the Labor Party

The defeat in the 2001 elections further intensified the leadership dispute between Thorbjørn Jagland and Stoltenberg in the Labor Party. In a 2016 autobiography, Stoltenberg wrote that he subsequently attended meetings discussing how to remove Jagland from the post of party leader. In November 2002 he replaced his party colleague Jagland as leader of the Labor Party.

Second term (2005–2013)

In the 2005 election , as party leader, he was his party's top candidate. Supported by a red-red-green coalition of the Labor Party, Sosialistisk Venstreparti (SV) and Senterpartiet (Sp), he became prime minister again on October 17, 2005 and he formed the Stoltenberg II government . He repeated his 2005 election victory in the 2009 election , when the Social Democrats again became the strongest party with 35.4 percent of the vote.

In 2010, he negotiated with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev over a border in the Barents Sea that had been disputed for 40 years . They were able to agree on a border where both parties would receive an approximately equal share of the area in which the oil and gas deposits are located.

The attacks in Norway in 2011 took place during Stoltenberg's reign . Personal acquaintances of Stoltenberg were also murdered on the island of Utøya , which the Labor Party uses for excursions with its youth organization. In his speech after the attack, he said that the answer to the violence should be more democracy and more openness, but never naivety. For his reaction and speeches after the tragedy, he received a lot of support from the population. However, a parliamentary commission of inquiry subsequently criticized the authorities for not having succeeded in protecting the population from a terrorist attack. Stoltenberg took responsibility for the mistakes of that time, but he ruled out resigning. He stated that he wanted to improve the situation from the office.

During his tenure, Norway's defense spending increased. Unlike his coalition partner, the Senterpartiet (Sp), he was a supporter of Norway's membership of the European Economic Area and, as prime minister, he rejected a renegotiation of the treaty demanded by the Sp.

In the 2013 election , the Workers' Party under Stoltenberg's leadership remained the strongest faction in the Storting, but the previous coalition did not receive enough mandates to continue forming the government. It was replaced on October 16, 2013 by the Solberg government. Stoltenberg was then group leader of the Social Democrats in the Storting.

NATO Secretary General (since 2014)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg with Donald Trump and Angela Merkel on July 11, 2018

On March 28, 2014, the North Atlantic Council appointed Stoltenberg as the new NATO Secretary General. He was supported in his application by Barack Obama and Angela Merkel , among others. He himself states that he initially had no direct intention of running for office, but that he was convinced by various heads of government. On June 14, 2014, Jonas Gahr Støre was elected to succeed him as leader of the Arbeiderpartiet. On 1 October 2014, Stoltenberg took over from Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark .

From June 11 to 14, 2015, he attended the 63rd Bilderberg Conference in Telfs-Buchen , Austria . He noted an increasingly aggressive behavior by Russia at the time, but dismissed a direct threat from the country to the military alliance. Stoltenberg is demanding that NATO member states increase their defense spending. So he said in 2018, after Germany announced higher spending, that he expected further increases. The aim should be to achieve the two percent of gross domestic product for military spending required by NATO member countries .

After the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey , Stoltenberg condemned the attempted coup and instead voiced support for the elected government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan . In October 2019, he called for the Turkish offensive in northern Syria to be kept limited so as not to further destabilize the region.

In 2018, his term of office was extended until autumn 2020. In March 2019, there was another extension for another two years until autumn 2022. In December 2021 it became known that Stoltenberg had applied for the post of head of the Norwegian central bank Norges Bank . His application was considered controversial as he has close ties to the Støre government and the Norwegian Ministry of Finance is responsible for making the decision . Statsminister Jonas Gahr Støre himself stated that he was biased in the process. On February 4, 2022, it was announced that Stoltenberg would become the new head of the central bank. However, his appointment should not take place until December 2022, which is why his opponent Ida Wolden Bache should hold the post on an interim basis.

awards

In 2005, Jens Stoltenberg received the Norwegian Association of Paediatricians' Child Health Award for his commitment to vaccination . In 2013 he was awarded the international Willy Brandt Prize .

web links

Commons : Jens Stoltenberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

itemizations

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predecessor government office successor

Kjell Magne Bondevik
Kjell Magne Bondevik
Prime Minister of Norway
2000–2001
2005–2013

Kjell Magne Bondevik
Erna Solberg