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Needless to say, the Storting preferred to overthrow the ministry rather than pass the agreement when it came before them in March 1923. Which Norwegian law prevented them from selling either in the country or abroad. The result pleased no one - Portugal bound itself against raising tariffs on Norwegian fish, and in exchange, Norway bound itself to import 850,000 litres of Portuguese fortified wine. The result was logical - the fishery industry had a sudden export slump, and the entire economy suffered.īlehr and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, spent much of 1922 negotiating new trade agreements with Spain and Portugal, and it was harder said than done. So they retaliated by raising import tariffs on Norwegian fish.

These countries traditionally recouped the cost of Norwegian fish by selling wine, a revenue stream that was now cut off. Norwegian fisheries had traditionally exported a large portion of their catch, and a lot of it went to France, Spain and Portugal.

But the most politically-significant issue was trade-related. Smuggling was one, as in other countries that instituted prohibition - the town of Son, south of Oslo, became a de facto smuggler's mecca - as was home distillation. Nevertheless, the result was honoured, and prohibition carried on. Over 80% of the deeply religious, conservative, smallhold-dominated western countryside voted in favour, while the more polarised and class-conscious east was evenly split, and the cities came down hard against - in Christiania, the result was 79% opposed. At the same time, regional divisions were clear. Gunnar Knudsen decided to settle the issue by referendum, which was held in October 1919 and produced a clear result - 61.6% of voting Norwegians were in favour of continuing the ban on spirits. Intended as a wartime measure, a strange coalition of western church groups and police chiefs in the major cities came together at the end of the war to demand that prohibition be extended into peacetime. The next year, it was expanded to include beer (except low-strength) and fortified wine. In 1916, the Storting passed a law banning distilled spirits for commercial consumption.

His government would last just under two years, and be dominated by the prohibition issue. He had been governor ( stiftsamtmann) of Christiania between 19, at which point he returned to national government as Minister of Justice. As a newly-minted representative, he'd led the charge to impeach the conservative Selmer ministry, which became the beginning of parliamentary democracy in Norway. Blehr was a true veteran of the party, having represented it in the Storting since 1883 and in ministerial office since 1891. Although the Høyre-FV coalition had won a clear plurality in the 1921 elections, they nevertheless had to stand down in favour of a more liberally-oriented Venstre minority government led by Otto Albert Blehr.

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