The health of Norway’s King Harald V has deteriorated further, with the royal palace describing the 89-year-old monarch’s condition as “very serious”.
Queen Sonja and Crown Prince Haakon, regent throughout his father’s illness, cancelled their entire programmes and travelled to Rikshospitalet in Oslo, where the king is being treated.
Crown Princess Mette-Marit, Prince Sverre Magnus and Princess Ingrid Alexandra arrived at the hospital on the morning of August 27, as did the king’s elder sister Princess Astrid. Members of the public began laying flowers outside the palace in central Oslo.
Harald has been in hospital since August 17, when fluid retention caused by cortisone treatment for haemolytic anaemia required his admission.
The condition involves an abnormally rapid destruction of red blood cells and brings on fatigue, breathlessness and a racing pulse.
The palace said on August 23 that his health had worsened over the weekend and that he was receiving antibiotics for a bacterial infection in his blood, adding that he had responded to treatment.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who abandoned a planned trip to Germany, told AFP he was “deeply affected” by the news. Masud Gharahkhani, president of the Storting, cut short a visit to Iceland.
Europe’s oldest reigning monarch has repeatedly ruled out abdication, arguing that the oath he swore before Norway’s parliament was for life.
Harald acceded to the throne in 1991 and was fitted with a pacemaker after a run of infections, among them hospital stays in Malaysia in 2024 and in Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands, in February. Were he to die, Haakon would succeed him immediately.
Other members of the household have faced difficulties this year. Mette-Marit received a lung transplant on June 17, eight years after being diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, and was named in Jeffrey Epstein documents released in the United States in January that set out her correspondence with the convicted sex offender.
Her son Marius Borg Høiby, who has no place in the line of succession, was sentenced on June 15 to four years in prison for two rapes and 32 further offences, including the abuse of a former partner.
Høiby is appealing the verdict and remains under house arrest with an electronic tag at the royal estate of Skaugum, an arrangement an Oslo court extended until September 7. He was among those seen at the hospital.
The Norwegian monarch is ceremonial head of State. Norway rejected European Union membership in referendums in 1972 and 1994, though a debate on accession resurfaced in 2025, and the country sits inside the single market through the European Economic Area and the Schengen area.
