By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO (Reuters) – Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was set to become Norway’s new finance minister on Tuesday as part of a cabinet reshuffle, broadcaster NRK and Norwegian newspapers reported, citing anonymous sources.
Stoltenberg, a Labour Party veteran politician, was prime minister of Norway in 2000-2001 and 2005-2013. He headed the Western military alliance for a decade, including during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, stepping down last year.
The 65-year-old is an economist by training and was finance minister in 1996-1997. He is widely seen as a pragmatist centrist.
At NATO, Stoltenberg was dubbed the “Trump-whisperer” for convincing Donald Trump to stick with the alliance after the U.S. president complained during his first term that allies were spending too little on defence and threatened to pull out.
Non-EU Norway, a country of 5.5 million with an export-oriented economy, fears it could be vulnerable should there be a transatlantic trade war. Its main exports are oil, gas and fish.
Norway’s eurosceptic Centre Party quit the government on Thursday in a dispute over the adoption of European Union energy policies, leaving the centre-left Labour to rule alone, eight months before elections.
Labour has been lagging in polls ahead of the September election. Stoltenberg has been widely popular with Norwegians during his time at NATO and afterwards and could boost Labour’s prospects.
In 2022, Stoltenberg was due to become Norway’s central bank chief but did not take up the role after then-U.S. President Joe Biden asked him to continue as NATO chief.
During his first stint as PM, Stoltenberg set up the so-called spending rule, a self-imposed rule that says that Norwegian governments should not use more than 4% of the total value of the sovereign wealth fund for national budgets.
That rule has since then been reduced to 3% as the fund has grown in value.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche, editing by Terje Solsvik and Ros Russell)
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