Erna Solberg
Erna Solberg was prime minister of Norway from 2013 to 2021, the second woman after Brundtland and the first Conservative to serve two full terms, the Bergen politician called Iron Erna for the asylum policy she had run as local government minister in 2001-05. She led the Conservatives from 2004 through two defeats to the election of 2013 and governed for eight years with the populist Progress Party, the first time it had been in office, and later with the Liberals and Christian Democrats as well. The years were the oil price's fall of 2014 that cost the sector fifty thousand jobs and was met by drawing on the fund for the first time. There was the municipal reform that merged four hundred and twenty-eight municipalities into three hundred and fifty-six, the tax cuts and the police reform. There were the refugees of 2015 and the fence at the Russian border at Storskog. There was the pandemic, in which Norway had among the lowest death rates in Europe and she was fined for a birthday dinner that broke her own rules, and the election of 2021 that Støre won. She was born in Bergen in 1961, was diagnosed with dyslexia at sixteen and has talked about it since. She studied sociology, political science and economics at Bergen, and led the Conservative students. She was elected to the Storting for Hordaland in 1989, at twenty-eight, where she has sat since. The government's foreign policy kept Norway's place as the West's quiet mediator, in Colombia, the Philippines and Venezuela, and its defence spending rising toward NATO's two per cent with new frigates, submarines and the F-35s. The Chinese freeze after the Nobel prize to Liu Xiaobo was ended in 2016 by a statement that Norway would not undermine China's core interests, which the critics called kneeling. She led the opposition until 2025, when her husband's share-trading on the strength of her office, revealed in 2023, and the election defeat of September 2025 ended it. She stepped down as party leader in 2026 after twenty-two years, the longest of any Norwegian party leader.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Norwegian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
