Parliamentary elections on Monday

Norway’s upcoming election has sparked a wide-ranging debate about national values, leaving voters wrestling with how close the Nordic country should be to the European Union (EU). All seats in the 169-member Parliament are up for grabs in Monday’s vote.

The country is now ruled by Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s Conservatives in coalition with the populist Progress Party, propped up by votes from the Christian Democrats and the Liberals.

Surfing a populist wave, Norway’s rural Center Party has promised to condition its coalition support for Labor with demands for a public inquiry into the country’s EU relationship. Norway isn’t in the EU, but it has access to its single market of half a billion people. It also accepts the free movement of EU migrants, enacts reams of EU law and pays a membership fee to do that. “We are a country that has always been opposed to elites. And the EU is an elite that takes too much power away from our Parliament. We think it transfers too much sovereignty to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels,” said Center Party leader Sygve Slagsvold Vedum.

“This is much less radical than Brexit, since we are not an EU country. But we will watch closely what happens in the U.K.,” he said.

Before the vote, the Center Party’s poll ratings have surged.