The only thing that was clear in Denmark before was that everything was very unclear. Not much has changed since the election night. According to initial projections, twelve parties will be represented in the newly elected Danish parliament – the previous record was eleven parties in 1977. There are also two MPs each from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. And Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the two-time ex-Prime Minister, is likely to become the kingmaker he has been dubbed as before. But what does this mean for government formation?
The Social Democrats of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen remain the strongest party with around 27 percent, the second strongest party was the bourgeois Venstre, which came to 13.5 percent.
So far, the Danish party landscape has been divided into a red center-left coalition led by the Social Democrats and a blue center-right coalition. According to the latest projections by the broadcaster DR, the red camp only has 81 of the 179 seats in parliament, the blue block around Venstre boss Jakob Ellemann-Jensen has 78. 90 seats are needed for a majority in Floketinget.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the ex-prime minister and former leader of the liberal-conservative Venstre party, has positioned his moderates, which were only founded in June, between these two blocs – and during the election campaign only committed himself not to wanting to commit himself in advance. In the TV debates, he presented himself as a pragmatic man of the middle, who wanted to disregard the encrusted right-left thinking. The calculation worked for him, according to the first projections, he got more than nine percent of the votes, which corresponds to 17 seats. He is now actually the “kongemager”, i.e. “kingmaker”, as which he was previously apostrophized.
Lars Lokke Rasmussen, former Danish prime minister, presented himself as a pragmatic man of the centre.
(Photo: IMAGO/Thibault Savary / Le Pictorium/IMAGO/Le Pictorium)
Frederiksen could not help but call new elections
The previous head of government, Mette Frederiksen, had also shown herself to be open to a broad, cross-bloc government formation. Before the election, she repeatedly emphasized that the political situation in the world was so messed up that it was time to try out a new form of government.
Frederiksen has led a minority government for the past three and a half years, in which she and the Social Democrats have mostly been able to rely on other left-wing parties. But she also repeatedly cooperated with the conservatives, especially when it came to new tightening of migration policy.
Frederiksen initially led Denmark confidently through the pandemic. The tide turned, however, when it turned out in November 2020 that the coronavirus had mutated in the bodies of farmed mink. The prime minister ordered the killing of all 15 million Danish mink. But there was no legal basis for this. After 600 days of work and more than 70 hearings, a commission of inquiry gave the government such devastating evidence that Frederiksen had no choice but to call new elections at the beginning of October. One of the coalition parties had threatened to withdraw support for its minority government.
Before this election, political analysts ran through eight to twelve possible coalition scenarios. The fact that the official final result will probably not be published until Thursday – experience has shown that counting in extremely sparsely populated Greenland takes a little longer – is of little consequence: the coalition negotiations are likely to be so difficult that a new government will not emerge until winter.