After having feared during the evening to lose her majority, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, emerges for the moment victorious by one seat in the legislative elections which took place on Tuesday 1is November.
At the end of a long electoral evening, the left bloc obtained 87 seats, to which must be added three seats from Greenland and the Faroe Islands forming a majority of 90 seats, out of the 179 in the Danish Parliament.
In power for four years, the Social Democrats alone won 50 seats, increasing their 2019 score by 1.6 points with 27.5% of the vote.
« Merci »wrote Ms. Frederiksen, posting a photo of herself smiling on Instagram, her favorite medium. “I am very, very happy”she told the press when she arrived at Parliament with her husband, after a long election night.
Breakthrough of the centrists
The bloc bringing together the right and the far right comes second with 72 seats and the centrist party of the Moderates has 16.
It is a performance for this new centrist formation credited with barely 2% of voting intentions two months ago, but it is also a disappointment. Earlier in the evening, the leader of the Moderates, former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, had hoped to be able to act as referees.
The early poll was prompted by the “mink crisis”: a party supporting the government had threatened to bring it down if it did not call an election to ensure voters’ confidence after the decision, later declared illegal, slaughter the country’s huge mink herd to fight the coronavirus.
Inflation at its highest for forty years, high energy prices and the health system had dominated the poll.
Recomposition on the far right
In a country that has championed rigorous migration for more than twenty years, including within Ms. Frederiksen’s Social Democratic Party, the election was also marked by a shake-up within the populist anti-immigration right-wing formations, divided into three rival parties.
The long influential Danish People’s Party (DF), which pranced above 20% just a few years ago, is falling to around 2.5-2.9%, its worst result since entering parliament in 1998. It is a new party founded by the former minister of immigration, Inger Stojberg, the Democrats of Denmark, which would win the day with 9.4% and 17 mandates. Since the late 1990s, the far right has had a significant influence on Danish politics.
Voter turnout is traditionally high in Denmark. In 2019, 84.6% of the approximately 4.2 million voters traveled to vote.