OSLO — Norway's Crown Prince Haakon said today he would marry his girlfriend, Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, capping an unprecedented royal romance with a single mother who has a son by a former relationship.
"The king informed the Cabinet today that the crown prince has become engaged to Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby," King Harald's private secretary Berit Tversland told Reuters.
No date for the wedding was set. Haakon is a trainee diplomat at the Foreign Ministry. Tjessem Hoiby is a student dubbed the "Cinderella from Kristiansand" after her hometown in south Norway.
The two, both 27, were to hold a news conference at the palace later today. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and opposition politicians congratulated the couple.
Yet the romance has stirred nagging questions about how far the royal family can go in mimicking the lifestyles of citizens before they become irrelevant as figureheads for the nation of 4.5 million inhabitants.
The Crown Prince irked conservatives and some bishops in Norway's state Protestant church in September by breaking with royal precedent in Europe and announcing that he planned to live with Tjessem Hoiby in an Oslo flat before getting married.
Critics said Haakon, who will be head of the church as king, should set a conservative moral example.
And when Haakon announced that Tjessem Hoiby was his girlfriend in May, he admitted she had attended "house parties" in the 1990s at which drug taking was common.
Tjessem Hoiby has a three-year-old son, Marius, by a former relationship with a man who has court convictions including for possession of cocaine.
Opinion polls, however, show most Norwegians reckon Haakon, a great-great-great grandson of Britain's Queen Victoria, should be allowed to follow his heart in choosing his bride and their queen.
Republicanism has never been strong in Norway, where monarchs have symbolized independence for a nation ruled by Sweden until 1905. The last time parliament voted on a proposal to scrap the monarchy, in 1994, it was defeated by 103 votes to 17.
Yet one recent opinion poll in the daily Verdens Gang showed 26 percent of Norwegians had a more negative view of the monarchy because of Haakon's relationship to Tjessem Hoiby. Ten percent were more positive but 64 percent were unaffected.
Turmoil about the romance has run deeper than when King Harald upset traditionalists in 1968 by marrying a commoner, Sonja Haraldsen, rather than a princess. Sonja is now queen.
King Harald has admitted that the issue of extra-marital cohabitation has been problematic. Norway's 1814 constitution says that only children born within royal wedlock can inherit the throne.
Many reckon Tjessem Hoiby's son Marius will end up with the worst deal, living largely ignored in the shadows of the monarchy with princesses and princes for half-sisters and brothers.