Oslo  - People all over Norway are dusting down their suits and tweaking their bowties in preparation for May 17 Saturday.

The glorious 17 is when jubilation over the country's constitution day and the effects of sudden exposure to sunlight produce a bout of patriotic fervour, often puzzling to the foreigner.

Visitors to Oslo, keen to observe the national day celebrations, soon find out that instead of the pageantry associated with St Patrick's Day in New York or Dublin, there are flags.

Huge parades with people marching past the Royal Palace waving their flags and wearing their national costumes are the order of the national day.

In the villages and smaller towns, where there is no royal box to wave to, things are a little different. The parades include representatives from the local clubs. So you have the bicycle club cycling by, the canoeing club carrying a canoe, the tennis club with their rackets and so on. These are interspersed with flag-wavers.

In villages, too small to have have many clubs, there is flag- waving.

Negative foreign comment on the flag-waving is not well-received. The average Norwegian takes the same attitude towards the national day as a small child does to Christmas and will express disappointment and concern that you don't believe in the flag.

However, aside from flag-induced ennui, foreigners may be right to be wary of displays of chauvinism.

Xenophobia became mainstream at the last Norwegian election with the fortunes of the right-wing, anti-immigration Progressive Party (PP) on the rise.

In 2005, the party scored its best result ever with 37 seats in the 169-seat parliament, up 11 on the 2001 result.

Although the party has always denied charges of racism, its campaign literature for the 2005 election could not have stated its position more blatantly while remaining within the law.

A brochure featured a man wearing a balaclava and brandishing a shotgun was captioned: "The perpetrator is of foreign origin."

Olaf Thommessen, a deputy leader of the Liberal Party called the leaflet "absolutely appalling" and Nadeem Butt, the head of The Anti- Racist Centre in Norway, said it was "not worthy of a Norwegian political party," according to Oslo's Aftenposten newspaper.

"This is a low and places the PP on the outermost right-wing in European politics," Thommessen said. The prominent Liberal politician compared the brochure's content with the arguments of Le Pen and said that the approach would repel voters.

But voters were not repelled. On the contrary, they were swayed by the party's arguments that criminality was growing among immigrants.

The party's stance was based on the figures from Statistics Norway (SSB) that calculated crime rates and ethnicity from 2002. The rate of non-Western immigrants convicted of crimes then was 30 per 1000, compared to 14 Norwegians per thousand.

SSB noted that "the higher percentage of young males in the immigrant population was a contributing and explanatory factor behind the high representation."

Many very young males will be marching with their kindergartens and schools as part of Saturday's celebrations in Oslo where 35 per cent of school-going children come from an immigrant background.

In grand May 17 tradition, their participation in 2008 has not been without controversy. This year's spat has been about the right to bear foreign flags in the children's parade.

A group representing immigrants, Norsk Innvandrerforum, thought children with roots in other countries should be able to wave their own national flags in the parade that involves every school in the city.

Despite the arguments of immigrants' groups and protests from the left that the day should celebrate freedom not prohibition, 17 May committee organizers in Oslo have stuck to their guns and refused to allow any flags other the Norwegian flag, the UN flag and that of the Sami minority of Northern Norway.

Those concerned about integration - and Norway has spent a great deal of money providing free Norwegian classes for foreigners amongst other measures designed to help immigrants integrate - should take heart from the fact that the debate has moved on from 20 years ago.

Then even the participation of foreign children in the parades was being debated and violently opposed in many quarters.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Oslo can look to Bergen where the flags of the world will take their place among the sea of blue, red and white on Saturday. (dpa)