Denmark holds legislative elections on Tuesday, contested by a left-wing and a right-wing and far-right bloc, with concerns about security and the energy crisis supplanting the immigration issue that dominated the 2019 elections.
The approximately 4.2 million Danish voters are called to vote after the Prime Minister, the Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen, was forced to call early elections for one of the parties that supported her government, the Social Liberal Party.
Praised for his management of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, it turned out to be precisely a decision related to it to overthrow the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark, which ordered – without legal basis, according to a subsequent investigation – the slaughter of more than 15 million minks, due to a mutation of the coronavirus, causing the anger of hundreds of mink farmers, in the country that was until then the world’s largest exporter of this animal’s fur.
Frederiksen described as “strange” to bring forward the elections in the midst of an “energy, economic and security” international crisis, due to the invasion and war in Ukraine by Russian forces, and guaranteed that his party, if it wins, will bet on the formation of a broad government.
Following the June 2019 elections, when she became Denmark’s youngest CEO at the age of 41, Mette Frederiksen undertook a strict policy towards refugees and immigrants, in the name of defending the welfare state, such as the limiting the percentage of people not born in Denmark who can live in certain neighbourhoods, in an attempt to promote integration.
Today the issue of immigration, due to the welcome given to the Ukrainian refugees, but above all because the parties have very close points of view, is no longer the issue of the electoral campaign, dominated by the issues of inflation, energy crisis and the war against European soil that causes strong security concerns in the Danes.
A clear example of the insecurity they feel is Bornholm, an island halfway between the Danish capital Copenhagen and Kaliningrad – a Russian enclave in the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania – where there has been an exponential increase in the number of volunteers for the guard local. , a volunteer branch of the Danish armed forces.
Mette Frederiksen, now 44, remains the electorate’s favorite to lead a government, with 49.4% support in the polls, compared to 27.4% for the Conservative Søren Pape Poulsen and 23.3% for the Liberal. Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, both candidates to succeed him.
But the polls are very close when it comes to voting for the “red bloc”, made up of several left-wing parties led by the Social Democrats, with 47% against 50%, compared to 49% against 50% of the “red bloc”. blue”. “, which includes in particular the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party and three right-wing nationalist parties.
The Danish political landscape is more fragmented than ever, with thirteen parties in a position to win seats in parliament (more than 2% of the vote), according to polls.
“Danish voters are more volatile than ever. About 45% have changed parties since the last election,” said political analyst Kasper Hansen of the University of Copenhagen, quoted by France-Presse.
Polls also show that it will be difficult for any of the blocs to have a majority in the 179-seat parliament, where the majority party currently has only 48, without the support of MPs from the autonomous regions of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
Frederiksen and his Social Democratic party hope to form a grand coalition and prevent the right and far right from coming to power, in an election that European capitals are paying close attention to after recent victories by far-right figures in Sweden and Italy.
Voter turnout is traditionally high in Denmark. In 2019, 84.6% of the approximately 4.2 million voters voted.
Source: TSF
