After the massacre on Utøya on 22 July 2011, Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg assumed the role as “comforter of the nation”, a response typically Scandinavian in its implication of a quasi-paternal relationship between prime minister and population. Writing in ‘Samtiden’, Stoltenberg describes the thinking behind the wording of his statements and sees in their overwhelmingly positive reception a “renaissance of the public address”.
Jens Stoltenberg
(born 16 March 1959) is a Norwegian politician, leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and the current Prime Minister of Norway.
