Norway’s Justice Minister Resigns in Storm Over Facebook Post

OSLO, Norway — Sylvi Listhaug’s anti-immigration views and sharp comments have made her one of Norway’s most polarizing political figures, but it was a single, incendiary Facebook post that has threatened to bring down the government and led to her resignation as justice minister on Tuesday.

Listhaug and her right-wing Progress Party, which is a junior partner in a fragile coalition, supported a bill that would have allowed the government to strip Norwegian citizenship from those suspected of joining terrorist or foreign militant groups, without a court hearing. After the bill was defeated earlier this month, she lashed out online.

In a Facebook post, which she has since taken down, she accused the center-left Labor Party of “protecting terrorists over citizens,” and attached a photo of two veiled and gun-toting fighters from the al-Shabab militant group in Somalia, thousands of miles away.

That hit a nerve in a country with still-raw memories of its worst terrorist attack in modern times, in which Labor members were the targets. In 2011, a far-right, anti-Islam extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, detonated a bomb outside a building housing offices of the government, then led by Labor, killing eight people, and then went to a Labor youth camp on Utoya island, where he shot dead 69 people, most of them teenagers.

The Facebook post, which coincided with the premiere of a film about the 2011 massacre, set off an escalating social-media war between Listhaug’s supporters and her foes, as she first refused to back away from it and then apologized repeatedly.

The post drew likes and shares from Listhaug’s anti-immigrant political base, and a far-right Facebook group orchestrated the delivery of piles of flowers to the Justice Ministry. But it also attracted outraged reactions and prompted an online campaign asking people opposed to her to contribute to the charitable group Doctors Without Borders. The effort raised its target figure of 15 million kroner, about $1.94 million, in a matter of days.

“I can’t recollect any other incidents in northern Europe where social media has created a cabinet crisis of this magnitude,” said Eirik Loekke of Civita, a center-right political think tank.

Opposition parties called a vote of no confidence in Listhaug in Parliament, which could have threatened Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s governing coalition. Listhaug resigned as justice minister just as that vote was about to begin.

“This saves the government,” said Lars G. Svasand, a political scientist at the University of Bergen.

Solberg’s center-right Conservative Party leads a minority coalition alongside the populist Progress Party and the more centrist Liberal Party. The prime minister elevated Listhaug to the justice post in January, in an attempt to co-opt and moderate the hard-line anti-immigrant populists.

Norway is often ranked as having one of the world’s most democratic and stable political systems, and in the past, minority coalitions have managed to govern through quiet pragmatism and compromise.

But Listhaug, 40, who rose to prominence as a social media firebrand, has struck out against that kind of cozy consensus, in a way that has fueled her rapid rise and fall.

She gained an early taste for politics as an intern at the Republican Party in the United States, before moving into a career alternating between national politics and lobbying.

She has been in government since 2013, first catching attention as an outspoken agriculture minister who took on small farmers and reindeer herders from the country’s indigenous Sami minority by cutting back subsidies. And she has stridently criticized other lawmakers from rival parties, including accusing the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Knut Arild Hareide, of “licking the back of Imams.”

In a Facebook post announcing her resignation Tuesday, Listhaug dismissed the controversy around her as a “witch hunt,” and expressed a willingness to carry on as a lawmaker in Parliament, vowing to speak freely come what may. The Progress Party leader, Siv Jensen, remained optimistic about Listhaug’s prospects, saying that her career had “only just begun.”

Espen Teigen, an adviser to Listhaug who is often cited as a driving force behind her social media strategy, also announced his resignation Tuesday.

In a Facebook post of his own, Labor’s leader, Jonas G. Store, welcomed Listhaug’s decision to step down.

“This case started with a Facebook post that never should have been published,” he wrote. “We cannot have a minister of justice who brings wood to the fire of hatred and conspiracy theories.”