Editing Vidkun Quisling (section)

===''Fører'' of a party in decline===
[[File:Vidkun Quisling på talerstolen, ukjent datering. (8616425227).jpg|thumb|Quisling on the podium during a party meeting in the 1930s]]
After the underwhelming election results, Quisling's attitude to negotiation and compromise hardened.<ref name="dahl100"/> A final attempt to form a coalition of the right in March 1934 came to nothing, and from late 1933, Quisling's ''Nasjonal Samling'' began to carve out its own form of national socialism. With no leader in Parliament, however, the party struggled to introduce the constitutional reform bill needed to achieve its lofty ambitions. When Quisling tried to introduce the bill directly, it was swiftly rejected,<ref name="dahl100">{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=100–105}}.</ref> and the party went into decline. In the summer of 1935, headlines quoted Quisling telling opponents that "heads [would] roll" as soon as he achieved power. The threat irreparably damaged the image of his party, and over the following few months several high-ranking members resigned, including [[Kai Fjell]] and Quisling's brother Jørgen.<ref>{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=105–109}}.</ref>

[[File:Vidkun Quisling holder tale i forbindelse med Setesdalsturen. (8616583576).jpg|thumb|left|Quisling speaks during a trip to [[Setesdal]], Norway, probably in 1936]]

Quisling began to familiarise himself with the international fascist movement, attending the [[1934 Montreux Fascist conference]] in December. For his party, the association with [[Italian fascism]] could not have come at a worse time, so soon after headlines of illegal [[Abyssinia crisis|Italian incursions into Abyssinia]].<ref>{{harvnb|Høidal|1989|pp=204–205}}.</ref> On his return trip from Montreux, he met Nazi [[ideologue]] and foreign policy theorist [[Alfred Rosenberg]], and though he preferred to see his own policies as a synthesis of Italian fascism and German Nazism, by the time of the 1936 elections, Quisling had in part become the "Norwegian Hitler" that his opponents had long accused him of being.<ref name="dahl110">{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=110–117}}.</ref> Part of this was due to his hardening [[antisemitic]] stance, associating Judaism with Marxism, liberalism, and, increasingly, anything else he found objectionable, and part as a result of ''Nasjonal Samling's'' growing similarity to the German Nazi Party. Despite receiving an unexpected boost when the Norwegian government acceded to Soviet demands to arrest [[Leon Trotsky]], the party's election campaign never gained momentum. Although Quisling sincerely believed he had the support of around 100,000 voters, and declared to his party that they would win an absolute minimum of ten seats, ''Nasjonal Samling'' managed to poll just 26,577, fewer than in 1933 when they had fielded candidates in only half the districts.<ref>{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=117–126}}.</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Høidal|1989|p=236}}.</ref> Under this pressure, the party split in two, with Hjort leading the breakaway group; although fewer than fifty members left immediately, many more drifted away during 1937.<ref>{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|p=128}}.</ref>

Dwindling party membership created many problems for Quisling, especially financial ones. For years he had been in financial difficulties and reliant on his inheritance, while increasing numbers of his paintings were found to be copies when he tried to sell them. Vidkun and his brother Arne sold one [[Frans Hals]] painting for just four thousand dollars, believing it to be a copy and not the fifty-thousand-dollar artwork they had once thought it to be, only to see it reclassified as an original and revalued at a hundred thousand dollars. In the difficult circumstances of the [[Great Depression]], even originals did not raise as much as Quisling had hoped.<ref>{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=130–133}}.</ref> His disillusionment with Norwegian society was furthered by news of the planned [[Constitution of Norway|constitutional reform]] of 1938, which would extend the parliamentary term from three to four years with immediate effect, a move Quisling bitterly opposed.<ref name="dahl134"/>