Harald Trefall

Trefall started his political career in the 1983 local elections when he was elected as a city councillor for the Progress Party in Bergen.^[4][7] He left the party in 1986^[8] because he thought that it no longer followed its own political program, and claimed that he finished his term by only representing the party's program, rather than its party group. He believed that the party really wanted to open the borders, and that its policy thus was too liberal with regards to immigration.^[9] Trefall was one of the founders of Folkebevegelsen mot innvandring (FMI) in 1987.^[10] For the 1989 parliamentary election, he headed the list of the Stop Immigration party in Hordaland.^[11] He founded the Fatherland Party in 1990, and was elected as a Hordaland county councillor following the 1991 local elections.^[12] In 1993, he was part of a joint Scandinavian meeting of immigration opponents in Oslo, where notably Denmark's Mogens Glistrup was egged and beaten up by youth from the Blitz movement and SOS Rasisme.^[13]

Trefall's main political concern was the recent immigration to Norway. He considered the new ethnic groups to be a threat to Norwegian homogeneity, and believed that it would be devastating for the country in the long run. His solution for helping those in need, was to support them in local refugee camps, rather than letting them come to Norway.^[14] Although he stated that all humans were of equal worth, he voiced support for nativism, arguing that each country's native citizens should be given special preferential rights in relation to migrants and refugees.^[9]

He was also opposed to the European Economic Community (later the European Union), which he believed would eventually collapse like the Soviet Union. He thought that the principle of open borders would destroy the common fellowship and good camaraderie between countries.^[9] In 2001 he argued that the demand voiced by Lars Sponheim for increased work-based immigration to Norway was evocative of the "slave-owner ideology" of former colonial societies, such as the slaveholding United States. In addition, he held that Thorbjørn Jagland expressed racist attitudes when he promoted immigration to Norway in order to make immigrants take the "dirty jobs" Norwegians would not accept. He maintained that the immigrants in turn would become just as selective as the Norwegians, which in turn would require a corresponding increase of immigration.^[15]