Norway’s King Harald V dies at 89

London: King Harald V of Norway has died at the age of 89 following weeks of mounting concern about his health after he was diagnosed with a blood infection and taken to hospital in Oslo.

The Royal Household of Norway announced that the king had died on Friday morning at 6.35am (2.35pm AEST).

“It is with deep grief that we announce that His Majesty King Harald has passed away,” the palace said in a brief statement.

The death of Harald means his 53-year-old son Haakon becomes monarch.

Haakon’s daughter Ingrid Alexandra becomes crown princess. She is the first female heir to the throne of Norway in 600 years. The last woman to reign was Queen Margaret in the late 1300s.

The Norwegian royal family had gathered at Harald’s bedside after news emerged that Europe’s oldest living monarch was in a “very serious” condition in hospital.

Crowds had also gathered outside the royal palace in Oslo and political leaders cancelled trips outside the country to return to the capital and show respect for the king, who reigned for 35 years.

Ingrid Alexandra returned to Norway in June from her university studies in Australia at a time of growing concern over the king’s health.

Harald was immensely popular with the Norwegian public despite scandals in the wider family, including one member’s conviction for rape and another’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

While support for the monarchy has declined in recent years, Harald gained a “grade” of 9.2 on a scale of 1 to 10 in a survey by Norstat for Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) in February. Haakon is also popular, as is Ingrid Alexandra.

Harald was taken to hospital on August 17 and treated for a bloodstream bacterial infection, according to the Royal House of Norway, which said his condition deteriorated last weekend.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere cancelled a ​trip to Germany one day before Harald’s death, in a sign of the concern about his health.

The Speaker of Norway’s parliament, Masud Gharahkhani, ended an official visit to Iceland and returned to Norway. Members of the College of Bishops of the Lutheran Church of Norway also planned to return to Oslo from an official visit to Rome.

Haakon, who had been acting as Regent, visited his father at Oslo University Hospital with his wife, Mette-Marit, and other members of the family in the days before the king’s passing.

Scandals have taken their toll on the family. Mette-Marit, 53, apologised in February when her friendship with Epstein was revealed in detail in emails released by the US Department of Justice.

“I was manipulated and deceived,” Mette-Marit said of her friendship with Epstein in a February television interview. She said she never saw anything illegal, but her emails showed her joking with Epstein and admitting she had Googled him, indicating she knew something of his past.

Mette-Marit underwent a double lung transplant in June after years of poor health, but the Norwegian public has turned against her over the Epstein concerns and a separate scandal with her son, Marius Borg Høiby.

Høiby, 29, is currently serving a four-year prison sentence after being found guilty in June of two counts of rape as well as assault, drug possession and other charges.

Høiby holds no royal titles because he is the son of Mette-Marit and a man she knew before her relationship with Haakon. As the stepson of the former crown prince, however, he has been a prominent member of the family.

The death of the king and the accession of Haakon will sharpen questions over the future of the monarchy when the Norwegian public appears reluctant to accept Mette-Marit as queen.

In the latest survey, the public rated Haakon as 7.9 when asked about his performance, but gave Mette-Marit a score of only 3.7.

The role of Ingrid Alexandra is seen as becoming even more important because of the workload borne by her father and the need for other members of the family to share the royal duties.

The princess moved to Australia in August last year to begin a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney with a focus on international relations and political economy. A keen surfer and skier, she began the course after completing her military service in Norway.

But she cut short her time in Sydney in June this year and returned to Oslo when her mother was undergoing surgery. She is due to study at the University of Oslo for the rest of this year, on exchange from the University of Sydney, and it is not clear whether she can resume her life in Australia.

Harald’s wife of 57 years, Queen Sonja, 89, was at the hospital with her husband in recent days. The couple met in 1959 but did not marry for nine years because Sonja was a commoner and their union was opposed by Harald’s father, King Olav V. The monarch relented, however, when Harald told his father that if he could not marry Sonja, he would not marry at all.

Born in 1937, Harald was taken to the United States for his safety when Germany invaded Norway in 1940. His grandfather, King Haakon VII, refused to negotiate with the Nazis and reigned in exile from London until returning home at the end of the war.

Harald became crown prince in 1957, when his father became King Olav V upon the death of Haakon, who had reigned since 1905. Harold ascended to the throne in 1991.

Unlike other royal families, the Norwegian monarchy can trace its history to a democratic vote of the public early last century, when Norway dissolved its union with Sweden and restored its own king.

A committee of the Norwegian government discussed its choice of monarch and selected Haakon, who was the second son of the crown prince of Denmark and a descendant of earlier Norwegian rulers.

The new king accepted the role on the condition it was ratified by the people, who supported the choice with a 79 per cent majority at a referendum in 1905. Upon his coronation, he took the Old Norse name of Haakon.

With Reuters, AP

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