– The way the Center Party treated SV in the run-up to the election in 2021 was really arrogant. Suffered from hubris and actively weakened the relationship with a party they could depend on to cooperate with, writes Lysbakken in his new book “I alle dager – Min historie: Vår tid”, which comes out on Thursday.
The case was first discussed by VG.
– On the whole, there was little contact and zero coordination between Vedum and me on the way into the decisive election campaign. I was frustrated by it, and amazed, Lysbakken tells in the book.
He describes how he experienced that the Center Party and its leader Trygve Slagsvold Vedum gradually distanced themselves from SV before the general election in 2021.
– The rhetoric moved slowly but surely away from what had only been an invisibility of SV. It increasingly revolved around distancing oneself from SV in general and from the environmental issue in particular. Vedum cultivated enemy images of townspeople who rode electric bicycles and drank coffee with milk, he writes.
– Contrary to everything I have experienced
Lysbakken, who was then SV leader, admits in the book that he was slightly offended by the behavior of former government partner the Center Party.
– Was I a little offended by the Center Party’s rejection? I guess I was. However, it was more about political disappointment than vanity, writes Lysbakken.
– Proceeding in that way goes against everything I have experienced is wise in politics. If you are to succeed over time, you must build positive relationships with others. At one point or another they will be good to have, he writes.
Vedum: Selective reading of history
Sp leader and finance minister Trygve Slagsvold Vedum responds like this to Lysbakken’s settlement in VG :
– He is free to do that, says Vedum to the newspaper.
But he believes that Lysbakken has left out an important part of the story when he says that Sp soured the atmosphere before the 2021 election:
– Lysbakken has a somewhat selective reading of history. I was also clear before the general election in 2017 that I would prefer to have an Ap/Sp government, so this was nothing new before the 2021 election. It is a line I have stood for over time, says Vedum.
Backfired towards the end
Lysbakken writes in his book that he initially accepted the turn the Center Party took.
– In the years before 2020, I perceived the Center Party’s positioning mostly as a tactical game to attract bourgeois voters. In the hunt for FRP-ers and Høyre people, it did not fit well with a dense sea of people with SV. I accepted that, and I also expressed it in conversations with Vedum, he writes.
When the election campaign in 2021 got underway in earnest, SV began to hit back hard, according to the former SV leader.
– For a long time we turned the other cheek, and I also stopped most of the ardent SVers who wanted to come out and criticize Sp for lack of climate policy or for identity posturing in debates about meat and petrol, writes Lysbakken.
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