Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is set to become Norway's new finance minister today as part of a government reshuffle, broadcaster NRK and a Norwegian newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources, Reuters reports.
Stoltenberg, a veteran of the Labor Party, was prime minister of Norway from 2000 to 2001 and from 2005 to 2013. He led the Western military alliance for ten years, including time during US President Donald Trump's first term, and stepped down last year.
The 1996-year-old is an economist by training and was finance minister from 1997 to XNUMX. He is known as a pragmatic centrist.
Within NATO, Stoltenberg has been dubbed the "Trump whisperer" for convincing Donald Trump to stay in the alliance after the US president complained during his first term that allies were spending too little on defence and threatened to withdraw.
Norway, a non-EU country of 5,5 million people and an export-oriented economy, fears it could be vulnerable in the event of a transatlantic trade war. Its main exports are oil, gas and fish.
Norway's eurosceptic Centre Party left the government on Thursday over a dispute over adopting European Union energy policies, leaving the centrist Labour Party to govern alone, eight months before an election.
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