The Center Party (SP), originally known as the Farmers' Party (BP), is a centrist political party in Norway which was founded on 19 May 1920 to defend the interests of the country's rural areas and to support a decentralized and autonomous policy. During the 1930s, there were fascist sympathies among the party's electorate, and Vidkun Quisling served as Defense Minister under the BP governments of 1931-1933. However, in 1935, the BP enabled the first stable Norwegian Labor Party (AP) government,. In 1959, the party changed its name to the "Center Party" to win voters outside of its declining agrarian electorate, and the party held the premiership from 1965 to 1971 under Per Borten. The party maintained a hardline Eurosceptic stance and, from the 1930s to 2005, it only joined non-AP governments, reversing its stance in 2005 to form a "Red-Green coalition" government. The party favored economic protectionism to protect Norwegian farmers with toll tariffs, and it also declared Norwegian nationalism a positive force. By 2017, it was the fourth-largest party in Norway, almost always hovering between 4th and 5th place.
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