Biography|Erik Solheim — The First Storting Seat from Sør-Trøndelag

People remember Solheim as an environment minister and a UN official.

The first elected office that put him in this building came earlier, and from a different county.

At the 11 September 1989 general election he won a seat for the Socialist Left Party in Sør-Trøndelag.

The Storting's own register lists him as representative no. 4 for that county in the 1989–1993 term.

The session opened on 1 October 1989.

He already knew the party machinery from the inside.

He had led Sosialistisk Ungdom from 1977 to 1980, served as SV party secretary from 1981 to 1985, and taken the party leadership in 1987.

The Sør-Trøndelag mandate was the first time voters put him on the floor of Langlet's 1866 parliament house on Karl Johans gate.

From 1993 he sat for Oslo instead, through the 1997–2001 term.

On 1 April 2000 he left the chamber to become a special adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Sri Lanka talks.

Lisbet Rugtvedt met in his place until the period ended.

The building in front of a visitor today is still the working Storting.

The lions on Løvebakken face the same street they faced when the 1989 class walked in.

The seat from Trøndelag is the pin that turns a party official into a member of parliament.

Twelve years in the house followed that first mandate: three terms, two constituencies, then a departure into diplomacy rather than another campaign.

The chamber did not make him a minister. That came later, from a different room in the same city.

What it did make him was a named representative with a county behind his name.

Photo: Drlady, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.