By the end of the summer, the Norwegians thought they had hit rock bottom. They had first learned with horror, on August 4, of the arrest of Marius Borg Hoiby, the son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, suspected of having attacked his girlfriend. Then, on August 31, they attended, stunned, the very controversial marriage of Princess Märtha Louise, eldest daughter of King Harald V and Queen Sonja, with the American Durek Verrett, a self-proclaimed shaman, suspected of charlatanism. The worst, however, was yet to come: Marius Borg Hoiby, 27, was placed in pre-trial detention on November 18, before being released on November 27. He is accused of two rapes, one of which was documented by a video found by police on his cell phone.
Initially cautious, specialists in Norwegian royalty now admit that the situation is serious: “This is the biggest crisis [qu’ait connue la monarchie] since 1905 and the independence of the country”, believes Caroline Vagle, reporter at the magazine See and Hor. Commentator on the TV2 channel, Ole-Jorgen Schulsrud-Hansen explains: “It’s the other side of the coin when you have a family at the head of state. Anything that affects the family affects the institution, and vice versa. »
For those, still a minority in the country, who dream of seeing Norway become a republic, these serial scandals above all reveal “the problems inherent to the monarchical regime”notes Socialist Left Party MP Andreas Sjalg Unneland: “It’s a kind of lottery. One can only hope that the members of the royal family behave well and that one will be lucky with those who are born or married there. »
Alcohol and cocaine
In the family photo, Marius Borg Hoiby has a special place: born in 1997 from a relationship between Mette-Marit, a waitress at the time, and Morten Borg, a financial analyst convicted in the early 2000s for possession and use of narcotics, the young man does not have royal blood. But her mother, who married Crown Prince Haakon in 2001, became the future queen of Norway. Although this union was controversial at the time, it was ultimately accepted by the Norwegians as a sign of a modernization of the monarchy.
Raised in the opulence of palaces, Marius Borg had led a dissolute life since the end of his high school years in 2016. In 2017, he was fined for possession of cocaine at a music festival. His troubles with the law ended there. Until August 4: suspected of having physically attacked his girlfriend the day before, in an apartment in the chic Frogner district of Oslo, he was arrested for the first time. A few days later, he made an act of contrition. In a press release addressed to the public broadcaster NRK on August 14, he admitted the facts, while ensuring that he had acted “under the influence of alcohol and cocaine” and claimed to suffer from “several mental illnesses”.
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