Norway PM forms minority govt after populists’ departure

COPENHAGEN – Norway’s prime minister on Friday presented her revamped centre-right government, four days after the populist Progress Party pulled out of the coalition over the decision to repatriate an Islamic State group-linked woman from a detention camp in Syria.

Erna Solberg, who heads a three-party minority government with her own Conservatives, the centrist Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats, tapped a new finance minister to replace Progress Party leader Siv Jensen, whose party left the coalition Monday.

Jensen said her anti-immigration party felt it had not been consulted when the woman was allowed to return to Norway.

The 29-year-old Norwegian woman of Pakistani descent reportedly travelled to Syria in 2013 and married a Norwegian foreign fighter there who was later killed in fighting.

The woman, who was not identified, was arrested last weekend upon her return and placed in an Oslo hospital with her children, one whom is reportedly ill. She had refused to let the sick child travel alone to Norway, which then allowed her to travel from a Kurdish-controlled camp where all three had been detained since March 2019.

Solberg said there was a majority in the government favouring getting the woman and her children home.