Denmark PM resigns, will try to form new government after election win

On Wednesday, Denmark's left-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reached out to the centre for broader collaboration, after winning a one-seat majority in a nail-biter general election.

Frederiksen's five-party "red" bloc had looked set to lose its majority as vote counting wore on throughout Tuesday evening, but as the last votes were tallied, the bloc eked out the 87 seats it needed in mainland Denmark.

Together with another three seats from the autonomous overseas territories of the Faroe Islands and Greenland, the bloc holds a total of 90 of parliament's 179 seats.

Opinion polls had predicted a historically-weak election for the Social Democrats, but they instead gained two seats compared to the 2019 election, winning 27.5 per cent of votes.

"Social democracy had its best election in over 20 years," Frederiksen said in a speech to campaign supporters early Wednesday.

"We are a party for all of Denmark," she added.

The right-wing "blue" bloc — an informal liberal and conservative alliance supported by three populist parties — won 72 seats in mainland Denmark and one in the Faroe Islands.

The photo-finish victory scuppered the hopes of a newly-created centrist party, the Moderates, of playing the role of kingmaker — an outcome that had looked likely until Frederiksen secured a majority.

Despite the success, Frederiksen, who heads a Social Democratic minority government, said she would resign as prime minister and try to form a new government with broader support across the political divide, something she had said suggested before the election.

"It is also clear there is no longer a majority behind the government in its current form. Therefore, tomorrow I will submit the government’s resignation to the queen,” said Frederiksen, adding that she would meet with other parties about forming a new government.

Frederiksen was forced to call the vote earlier this month amid the fallout from her government’s contentious decision to cull millions of minks as a pandemic response measure. The cull and chilling images of mass graves of minks have haunted Frederiksen since 2020 and eventually led to cracks in the centre-left bloc.

Polling at barely two per cent of voter support two months ago, the Moderates won more than nine percent of votes, and Lokke Rasmussen insisted he wanted to be "the bridge" between the left and right.

"It's not red or blue, it's about common sense," he told cheering supporters in a speech Tuesday evening, while declaring that a new government was a certainty.

Løkke Rasmussen said he too wanted Mette Frederiksen to try to form a government, but he would not point at her “as prime minister".

A two-time government leader who lost the 2019 election to Frederiksen and abandoned the centre-right Liberal party following an internal power struggle, Rasmussen, wouldn't say whom he would back as the next prime minister or whether he saw that role for himself.

“I know for sure that Denmark needs a new government, “ he told jubilant supporters in Copenhagen. “Who is going to sit at the end of the table we do not know.”

Denmark may be a small, tranquil country known for having some of the happiest people on Earth, but its politics is filled with intrigue that will be familiar to fans of the fictional Danish TV drama series “Borgen.”

Before the election, Frederiksen, 44, floated the idea of a broader alliance that would also include opposition parties, but was rebuffed by opposition leaders Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of the Liberals and Søren Pape Poulsen of the Conservatives, who both ran as candidates for prime minister in a centre-right government.

Even though the election result suggested she could ostensibly carry on as prime minster with only centre-left support, Frederiksen said she would keep her ambition to also reach out to opposition parties.

“The Social Democrats went to the election to form a broad government," she said. "I will investigate whether it can be done.”

ALSO READ:

• Danish Queen Margrethe apologises for stripping grandchildren of royal titles: Report

• Europe: Royal rift after queen strips grandkids' prince and princess titles

Denmark’s more than 4 million voters could choose among over 1,000 candidates — the most ever — from 14 parties. Four of the 179 seats in the Danish legislature, Folketinget, are reserved for the Faeroe Islands and Greenland, which are autonomous Danish territories.

Concerns about rising inflation and energy prices linked to Russia’s war in Ukraine and a shortage of nurses in the public health care system were key themes in election campaigns.

“What I feel is important and is a worry to many are the soaring prices, whether it be electricity, bread or gasoline,” said Inge Bjerre Hansen, 82, after casting her vote in Copenhagen. “My son is reducing the number of his visits because it has become expensive to fill the tank (of his car).”

Unlike in previous elections, immigration received little attention. Denmark has some of Europe’s strictest immigration laws and there is broad agreement among the major parties to keep it that way.

That and internal squabbles help explain the collapse of the populist Danish People’s Party, which spearheaded Denmark’s crackdown on immigration two decades ago. Once polling over 20 per cent, the party recorded its worst parliamentary election result since its creation in 1995, with around 3 per cent of the vote, the results showed.

The Danish People's Party faced competition for nationalist voters from new right-wing parties. Among them are the Denmark Democrats, created in June by former hardline immigration minister Inger Støjberg. In 2021, Støjberg was convicted by the rarely used Impeachment Court for a 2016 order to separate asylum-seeking couples if one of the partners was a minor.

She was eligible to run for office again after serving her 60-day sentence. The official results showed her party getting 8 per cent.

Frederiksen, who became Denmark's youngest prime minister when she took office at 41 more than three years ago, teamed up with the opposition to hike NATO-member Denmark’s defence spending in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Her steadfast leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic was partly overshadowed by the mink-culling episode.

The decision to slaughter up to 17 million minks to protect humans from a mutation of the coronavirus was taken in haste and without the required legislation in place. It dealt a devastating blow to Danish mink farmers, even though there was no evidence the mutated virus found among some minks was more dangerous than other strains.

• Europe