This Tuesday, November 1, 4.3 million Danish voters are called to ballot to elect a new head of government, seven months earlier than expected. On a political scene divided between 14 parties, neither of the two main blocs, the social liberals and the right, obtains a majority of 90 seats out of the 179 in the Folketinget, the local Parliament, according to the polls.
- Why are the elections early?
Mette Frederiksen has been Prime Minister leading a minority Social Democratic government since June 2019. At the beginning of October, she was pressured to call new general elections because her allies in Parliament, including the Social Liberals (Radikale Venstre), threatened to vote a motion of no confidence against her. The object of tension: inflation, which is particularly galloping in Denmark. Also, her popularity had begun to erode during the Covid-19 crisis, when she gave the order to cull all the country’s farmed mink herd, to fight the pandemic.
Faced with pressure and to avoid humiliation, the head of the Danish executive therefore called new elections seven months earlier than planned. Indeed, his mandate was to end in June 2023.
- How do these elections work in Denmark?
Denmark is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary regime. There are four types of elections: legislative elections, European elections, municipal elections and regional elections. Legislative elections are those which consecrate the head of government according to the majority that emerges in Parliament. The mandates of the deputies and the head of government are planned for four years.
“Metropolitan” Denmark has 175 seats, while two seats are allocated to Greenland and two others to the Faroe Islands (located between Iceland and Norway in the North Atlantic Ocean).
The Danish voting system is unique: 135 seats are provided directly by proportional representation in 10 constituencies. 40 seats are used as a complement where necessary to ensure proportionality. Voters have the option of voting for a party, or casting a preferential vote directly for a candidate on a party’s list. In addition to these 135 seats, there are 40 others intended to smooth out any discrepancy between the parties’ share of votes and their share of seats, in order to achieve better representativeness of the electorate.
The current Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, is the favorite in this election. According to polls, 58% of Danes believe she is best placed to lead the country. At 44, the current head of government embodies the center left won over to uninhibited migratory rigor in the name of the defense of the welfare state. Coming from a long-standing social-democratic family, daughter of a typographer and member of parliament since she was 24 in 2001, she intends to remain in her post, for which she has the confidence of a majority of voters.
Facing her, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, candidate of the Liberal Party is the second candidate credited with a large number of voting intentions. After a small career as a soldier, then as a lawyer, Jakob Elleman-Jensen ended up following the family vocation. His father, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, was chairman of the Liberal Party (1984-1998) and foreign minister (1982-1993). While his grandfather sat in Parliament and his sister currently sits there. Jakob Elleman-Jensen has been at the head of the Liberal Party since 2019. A crumbled party, since Lars Løkke Rasmussen, former Prime Minister (2009-2011 and 2015-2019) and ex-President of the Liberal Party, is facing him. He created a new party, ‘the Moderates’, which places itself at the center of the political spectrum. According to observers, he is having a very good campaign and his party has gone from 1.8% of voting intentions to 11.5% in just over a month in the polls.
The conservative party presents for its part Søren Pape Poulsen, for eight years its president, and long considered by voters as the most credible politician on the right. Its popularity has recently been enamelled. Former Minister of Justice, he also carried in 2018 the ban on the wearing of the full veil in public space. He is credited with 6% of voting intentions, ie 10 points less than two months ago.
- Why is a majority difficult to achieve?
On a political scene divided between 14 parties, neither of the two main blocs obtains a majority of 90 seats out of the 179 in the local parliament, according to the polls. The “red” bloc of Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen, made up of five left-wing parties, is credited with 49.1% of the voting intentions, or 85 seats, against 40.9% or 72 seats for the “blue” bloc. which includes three right-wing populist formations. In the centre, the “Moderates”, a party recently founded by former Liberal Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has 10% of the voting intentions (18 seats). Credited for his solid experience, Lars Løkke Rasmussen blows hot and cold, refusing to take a stand for one of the two blocks.
In their efforts to attract a centrist, often more volatile electorate, the Social Democrats warned that they wanted to govern across traditional divisions and took up the idea formulated by “the Moderates” of a unity government. The right, which campaigned on tax cuts and strengthening the health system, refused this outstretched hand.