Einar Gerhardsen

Einar Henry Gerhardsen (May 10, 1897 - September 19, 1987) was a Norwegian politician from the Labour Party of Norway. He was Prime Minister in three periods, from 1945 to 1951, from 1955 to 1963 and from 1963 to 1965.

Einar Gerhardsen sitting at his office.

Einar Gerhardsen was born in the municipality of Asker, in the county of Akershus. Originally a road worker, he became politically active in the socialist labour movement during the 1920s. He was convicted of taking part in subversive activities several times until he, along with the rest of the Labour party, gradually moved from communism to democratic socialism. By the middle of the 1930s, Labour had become a force on the national political scene, with Gerhardsen as the Mayor of Oslo and Johan Nygaardsvold as Prime Minister of a minority cabinet. During World War II, Gerhardsen took part in the organised resistance against Nazi occupation and was interred in concentration camps at Grini in Norway and at Sachsenhausen in Germany. After the war, it fell upon Gerhardsen to form the interim government which sat from the end of the occupation in May 1945 and until new elections could be held in November the same year. The election gave Labour an absolute majority in Parliament, the Storting, which it retained until the elections of 1961.

During and after he held office he was a greatly respected figure in the eyes of the people, even amongst those not sharing his social democratic views. Often referred to as "Landsfaderen" (Father of the Nation), he is generally considered as one of the architechts of the rebuilding of Norway after World War II. The governments he led forged an eclectic economic policy in which government regulation of commerce, industry and banking was combined with market economics. Abject poverty and unemployment was sharply reduced as a result of his government's policy of industrialisation and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation. In foreign policy, he aligned Norway with the Western powers at the end of the 1940s after some initial hesitation within the governing party, with Norway becoming a founding member of NATO.

Protocolls from 1958 substantiates that the Norwegian Labour Party Government with Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen knew that Israel was going to use heavy water supplied by Noratom AS for Plutonium production making it possible for Israel to produce nuclear weapons.

In November of 1962, an accident occurred in the Kings Bay mine on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, in which several miners died. In the aftermath, the Gerhardsen government was accused of not complying with laws enacted by the Norwegian parliament. In the summer of 1963, a vote of no confidence passed with the support of the Socialist People's Party and a centre-right minority coalition government was formed. While this new government lasted only for three weeks, until the Socialist People's Party realigned itself with Labour, it formed the basis for an opposition victory under the leadership of Per Borten at the elections of 1965. Gerhardsen retired from national politics in 1969, but continued to influence public opinion through writings and speeches.

Gerhardsen's political legacy is still an important force in Norwegian politics and especially within his own party, although some of the social policies of his government have been revised (See also Economy of Norway).

¹Nygaardsvold and his cabinet was in exile in London during World War II while Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany. In parts of this period Vidkun Quisling, leader of the Fascist party Nasjonal Samling, assumed a degree of formal power, but in reality the country was governed by the occupants, represented by the Reichskommissar Josef Terboven.