Norway Municipal elections 2023 — Results

The essentials

The municipal elections of 11 September 2023 delivered a clear victory for the Conservative Party (Høyre), which finished first nationally with 25.86% of the vote — its best local result in decades and the first time the party had topped a nationwide Norwegian election since 1924. Labour fell to 21.59% (though it still won the second-largest number of councillors, about 2,263, behind the Conservatives' roughly 1,851), the Progress Party recovered to 11.39%, and the Centre Party dropped back to 8.16%. Turnout was 62.2%. The major cities — Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger among them — swung to centre-right leadership.

Electoral system

Municipal councils are elected every four years by party-list proportional representation (modified Sainte-Laguë); voters may give personal and cumulative votes, and council size reflects population. Foreign nationals resident for at least three years may vote, so the local electorate is broader than in national elections.

A historic Conservative win

The Conservatives' first-place finish was historic: not since 1924 had the party topped a nationwide vote in Norway. The swing handed it the leadership of the country's biggest cities and represented a sharp reversal of the left's earlier urban dominance, making 2023 a high-water mark for the Norwegian centre-right at local level.

The cost-of-living swing

The rightward shift was driven by the cost-of-living crisis, soaring electricity prices and discontent over the wealth tax — the same grievances that would feature in the 2025 national election. As a mid-term verdict on Jonas Gahr Støre's red-green national government, the result was a clear punishment of the governing parties.

The Centre Party's collapse

The Centre Party, the chief winner of the 2019 local elections, was among the heaviest losers in 2023, falling back sharply. Having entered national government in 2021, it now bore some of the blame for the cost-of-living squeeze, and its rural protest momentum had faded.

Turnout

Turnout was 62.2%, somewhat below the unusually high 2019 figure but in the normal range for Norwegian local elections, which remain less heavily attended than parliamentary contests.

Why it matters

The 2023 local landslide marked the low point of the Støre government's mid-term standing and set expectations of a right-wing recovery — yet the subsequent 2025 national election would see Labour stage a comeback, a reminder that local and national cycles do not always move in step.

The urban swing on the map

The clearest way to see the scale of the Conservative win is the map above, which colours each municipality by its leading party. The story of 2023 is written in the cities: Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger — several of which the left had governed — swung to centre-right leadership, reversing the urban pattern of 2019 when the Greens and Socialist Left had advanced there. Click into the big-city municipalities to see how far the Conservative vote climbed. The rural picture is the mirror image of four years earlier: the Centre Party, which had painted much of the interior in 2019, fell back sharply as the cost-of-living squeeze it now shared responsibility for in national government eroded its protest appeal.

About the data

Norwegian Election Directorate (Valgdirektoratet) — valgresultat.no.

Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.