Turnout: 59.50%
About this election
The county council elections of 9 September 2019 were dominated by the rise of the Centre Party (Senterpartiet), which surged to 16.63% and 105 seats — third place nationally — on the back of fierce rural opposition to the government's regional reform. The Labour Party remained largest with 24.89% and 148 of the 574 county seats, ahead of the Conservatives (19.48%, 107) and the Progress Party (9.18%, 55). Turnout was 59.5%.
County councillors are elected by party-list proportional representation (modified Sainte-Laguë) for a four-year term within each county (fylke). As ever, Oslo — both a municipality and a county — held no separate county election. Long-term foreign residents are entitled to vote in the county contest alongside citizens.
This election filled the councils of the reorganised counties created by the controversial regional reform, which merged Norway's 19 counties into 11 from 1 January 2020. That is why the total number of county seats fell from 718 in 2015 to 574 in 2019. The reform consolidated regional administration into larger units, a change many regions resented as remote and centralising.
The forced merger of counties and municipalities was deeply unpopular in many regions, and the Centre Party campaigned explicitly to reverse it. Together with toll-road protests and worries about the centralisation of public services, this fuelled a "periphery strikes back" result that pushed the party to third place nationally and punished Erna Solberg's centre-right government.
The counties run regional transport, county roads, upper-secondary schools and dental services. The reform's promise of more efficient delivery from larger units was precisely what its opponents disputed, making the county elections an unusually direct referendum on the structure of regional government itself.
Turnout was 59.5%, higher than in 2015 and strong for a county election, reflecting how the merger controversy had energised voters — especially in the rural areas most affected by the redrawing of the map.
The county result, alongside the simultaneous municipal vote, confirmed the Centre Party's rural revolt as a national force and previewed its entry into government after the 2021 parliamentary election, with the reversal of the regional reform high on its agenda.
The map above colours each of the reorganised counties by the party that won the most seats there; click any county for its full party breakdown. Two things stand out. First, the Centre Party's rural revolt was geographically concentrated — its 16.63% national share translated into first place across large, sparsely populated interior counties, so it paints far more of the map than its vote alone would suggest, while Labour's lead rested on the populous coastal and southern counties. Second, the county map is not a copy of the municipal one: because Oslo holds no county election and the county tier hands more weight to rural regions, the same September vote can look markedly more "red-green urban" on the municipal map and more Centre-Party rural on the county map — a useful reminder that Norwegian local results depend heavily on which tier you are looking at.
Norwegian Election Directorate (Valgdirektoratet) — valgresultat.no.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.