Norway gambling monopoly safe after general election result

Norsk Tipping’s monopoly is in no danger for now.

Norway.- Norsk Tipping looks set to maintain its monopoly over gambling in Norway following the Labour Party’s general election victory despite the spate of recent criticisms and regulatory failings. 

Under prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, the Labour Party has won a second term in office with enough margin to be able to gain a two-seat majority in the 169-seat parliament with support from four smaller parties on the centre left. However, the populist right-wing Progress Party, which is in favour of ending the gambling monopoly in Norway, doubled its vote and came second in the poll with 48 seats and almost 24 per cent of the vote 

Pressure on Norsk Tipping had been mounting ahead of the election. The Norwegian gambling regulator Lotteritilsynet announced a full review of its Lotto, Eurojackpot and Vikinglotto products due to “poor control over its games”, and CEO Tonje Sagstuen resigned as a result of a blunder in which thousands of players were wrongly informed that they had won huge Eurojackpot prizes.

Other controversies have included a player being mistakenly paid NOK 25m (€2.1m) from the casino game KongKasino. Meanwhile, players using iPhones or iPads were unable to self-exclude from Norsk Tipping’s games for four months due to a technical fault that wasn’t discovered until a player reported it.

The regulator noted that there had also been serious draw errors in the Eurojackpot and the super draw that led to players in syndicates and gambling clubs having a greater chance of winning over several years, with wrong winners in many draws.

While the Progress Party is the only significant party to have a gambling liberalisation as a manifesto policy, some members of the conservative Høyre party, including Tage Pettersen, are also in favour of opening the market to commercial competition. Norway is becoming an outlier in the region. Denmark and Sweden have already opened competitive regulated markets and Finland is in the process of ending the monopoly of state-controlled Veikkaus with a view to opening a competitive licensed market by 2027. 

The reasonably solid election victory of the Labour Party means that Norsk Tipping’s monopoly is likely to be safe for the next four years. It also means that payment blocking and DNS restrictions against unlicensed offshore gambling platforms are likely to remain key enforcement mechanisms.

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See also: UK government blasts “irresponsible” speculation on betting tax amid horseracing strikes