Turbulent election sees Denmark pivoting towards… the centre? | Tech Reddy

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Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Photo Johan Wessman/News Øresund, Creative Commons license.

It took the count of the last precinct in the center of the city of Copenhagen on the night of the elections on Tuesday to transform the 90 pivotal seat in the column of the Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen.

The night of the nailbiting election seemed like a fitting conclusion to one of the most turbulent political terms in memory. Not only the external shocks of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the inflation crisis have set the agenda, but also the fall of the government that illegally slaughters all the country’s mink – and with he entire fur industry – for fear that infected animals will develop. covid mutations, and on top of that many parties of the left and the right have seen spectacular implosions and crisis of leadership.

A term has never seen so many party jumpers, and a little says it all that the main opposition party Venstre (right-wing liberal) has seen its former president and its former vice-president, (who was dismissed and thrown out of parliament for illegal). The administration of immigrants when he was a minister in the previous government), forming new parties and both broke into parliament with just under 10 percent of the vote each, leaving Venstre badly burned and close to half with only 13 per one hundred. And that also leaves out the president of the radicals of the great rights of gender (historical name, today completely centrist except for civil rights) who have to leave in a scandal #metoo, the conservative gay president, who lost what it seemed . a major gain in the polls after he had to admit that he had unwittingly spread lies about his Dominican partner’s background and had held a couple of shady meetings with Dominican politicians outside official diplomatic channels, or dramatic fights of power in the Danish extreme right. Popular party and in the Green Alternatives who have seen most of their PMs leave the party for others. The two polls have challenged that show them in difficulty with the threshold of 2 percent, and no less than 12 parties have entered the parliament.

It’s not exactly expected…

However, the party landscape on the left side has been a little more stable than the absolute chaos on the right and the coalition supporting Mette Frederiksen (4 smaller parties that support but do not participate in her minority social democratic government) it only applies to a majority.

Or sorta. Because one of the parties that supports it (the Radicals), not only forced early elections due to the mink scandal, but announced that if it supports another government led by the Social Democrats, it will not support another government of a party based only on votes. of the left And Mette F herself has announced that she will go for a government that reaches across the middle.

If she can find a majority to get there, that is. The Radicals are game, but left more than half with only 7 seats, and so are the new Moderates under the former Prime Minister and Venstre leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen, whose central political project is to obtain a broad government in the middle in the middle was awarded by the voters who do. they the third largest party with 16 seats.

But the other main parties of the right – Venstre and Conservatives – are not happy with the idea, and at least one of them is needed to reach a majority as a government that can really be called broad. Although compromise and cooperation are deeply rooted in Danish political culture and much legislation is made with a large majority, governments have traditionally been based on left- or right-wing coalitions with only one unfortunate example of a grand coalition in the 1970s.

Where it all ends remains to be seen. What is really new is that the voters have rewarded the Moderates and the Social Democrats for their great coalition projects, even if it could 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. He was the first to gain a large right-wing populist party all the way back in the 1970s, the first where his xenophobia (unfortunately) entered mainstream party politics, and he was one of the first to see the climate agenda. over the problem of immigration as the definition (along with the traditional economic problems). The disorder in the far right with now no less than three parties fighting for the nativist vote is also a symptom of this.

The other significant part is that the Social Democrats are now left standing as the only really broad party with support across the country in rural, provincial and urban areas, and it seems to have found a formula to buck the trend of decay that has. it hits all the old mainstream mass parties of Western Europe, and often worse on the left than on the right. Although one of the costs has been adopted a lot of xenophobic immigration policy of the right.

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