It took the counting of the very last precinct in inner city Copenhagen on election night Tuesday to move the pivotal 90th seat into the column of Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen.
The nailbiting election night seemed like a fitting conclusion of one of the most turbulent political terms in memory. Not only have the external shocks of the Covid pandemic, Ukraine war and inflation crisis set the agenda, but so has the fallout of the goverment illegally culling all the country’s mink — and with it the entire fur industry — due to fears of infected animals developing covid mutations, and on top of it several parties of both the left and right have seen spectacular implosions and leadership crisis.
Never has a term seen so many party jumpers, and it kind of says it all that the main opposition party Venstre (right wing liberal) saw both their former chairman and their former vice chairman, (who was impeached and thrown out of parliament for illegal immigrant administration when she was a minister in the previous government), forming new parties and both storming into parliament with just under 10 percent of the votes each, leaving Venstre badly bruised and close to halfed with only 13 percent. And that even leaves out the chairman of the big-on-gender-rights Radicals (historic name, today utterly centrist exept on civil rights) who had to leave in a #metoo scandal, the gay conservative chairman, who lost what had looked like a major gain in the polls after he had to admit that he unwittingly had brought on lies of his Dominican partner’s background and had held a couple of shady meetings with Dominican politicians outside the official diplomatic channels, or the dramatic power struggles in the far right Danish people’s party and in the green Alternatives that saw the majority of their PM’s leave the party for others. Both defied polls showing them struggling with the 2 percent threshold though and no less than 12 parties made it into parliament.
It hasn’t excactly been dull…
Still, the party landscape on the left side stayed somewhat more stable than the utter chaos on the right and the coalition backing Mette Frederiksen (4 smaller parties backing but not participating in her minority Social Democratic government) just hung on to a majority.
Or sort of. Because one of the parties backing her (the Radicals), not only forced the early election over the mink scandal, but has announced that while they will back another Social Democratic led government, they will not back another one party government based solely on the votes of the left. And Mette F herself has announced that she’ll go for a government reaching across the middle.
If she can find a majority to reach out to, that is. The Radicals are game, but left more than halfed with only 7 seats, and so are the new Moderates under former prime minister and Venstre leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen, whose central political project of getting a broad government across the middle was awarded by the voters making them the third largest party with 16 seats.
But the other mainstream right wing parties — Venstre and Conservatives — are not happy about the idea at all, and at least one of them are needed to reach a majority as well as a government that truly can call itself broad. Even if compromise and cooperation is deeply ingrained in Danish political culture and much legislation is done with broad majorities, governments have traditionally based themselves on either left or right coalitions with only one unhappy example of a grand coalition way back in the 1970’s.
Where it’ll all end up remains to be seen. What’s really new is that the voters awarded both the Moderates and the Social Democrats for their grand coalition projects, even if it might end up being impossible. Denmark has often been at the forefront of political developments in Europe, picking up trends that later manifest themselves in other countries. It was the first to gain a major right wing populist party all the way back in the 1970’s, the first where their xenophobia (sadly) entered the policy of the main stream parties, and is has been one of the first to see the climate agenda top the immigration issue as the defining one (along with the traditional economic issues). The disarray on the far right with now no less than three parties fighting for the nativist vote is also a symptom of this.
The other significant take away is that the Social Democrats are now left standing as the only really broad based party with support across the country in both rural, provincial and urban areas, and seems to have found a formula to buck the trend of decline that has hit all the old mainstream mass parties of Western Europe, and often worse on the left than on the right. Even if one of the costs has been adopting much of the right’s xenophobic immigration policy.