It turned out from the first day that Sverdrup as a Prime Minister was not the competent strategist that most Norwegians had either learned to fear or admire. He expected his adherents to follow him as they had done for almost 30 years. It also turns out that Venstre was a more loosely knit coalition than Sverdrup and the other leaders had expected. The fight against the powerful executive branch had created alliances that broke very quickly afterwards. Sverdrup and all his ministers belonged to the conservative faction of the party. They had strong support what the leading Norwegian sociologist, Stein Rokkan, labeled the periphery, adherents of lay Christianity in opposition to the clergy, adherents of the so-called New Norwegian in opposition to the Norwegian spoken in the cities, adherents of totalitarianism.