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Winning parliamentary elections may be the easy part for Denmark’s Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen.
Denmark’s leftwing bloc won a slender one-seat majority in Tuesday’s parliamentary election thanks to three mandates from parties in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. But her hopes of cobbling together a coherent government will require an upending of Denmark’s decades-old political system and a potential pact with the former centre-right prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
The Scandinavian country, like neighbouring Norway and Sweden, traditionally has two blocs: a leftwing “red” one, and a rightwing “blue” one that alternates in power.
Frederiksen, who has led a one-party minority administration for the past three years, on Wednesday repeated her calls for a new centrist government comprised of left and rightwing parties, as she quit as prime minister to begin the difficult process of forming one.
Such a coalition, which has been tried in Germany, was last used in Denmark in 1978 in a brief but disastrous administration that was quickly ended.
“It will be extremely difficult to form a new, stable government, not least because her goal is to form a centrist government,” said Lykke Friis, a former centre-right minister.
It is not just Frederiksen though who wants to see a left-right government. Rasmussen, her predecessor as prime minister, founded a new party six months ago with the express aim of forming one. His Moderates are now the third-largest in parliament after winning 9 per cent of the vote in Tuesday’s ballot.
Both Frederiksen and Rasmussen give two reasons for a centrist coalition, one temporary and one permanent. The temporary is the series of crises that Denmark and other European countries face: the sharp rise in inflation and cost of living as well as a deteriorating security situation in the Baltic Sea where the twin Nord Stream gas pipelines were recently blown up just outside Danish territorial waters.
The permanent reason is a desire by both party leaders to limit the influence of the many smaller parties in parliament, often at the extremes of the left and right. Parties need only 2 per cent of votes nationally to enter parliament, a lower threshold than either Norway or Sweden, leading to a flurry of new parties at most elections. No fewer than 12 parties, a record, will enter parliament from Denmark this time around, with four more coming from the autonomous territories of Greenland and the Faroes.
Jakob Engel-Schmidt, political head of the Moderates, said when he was in government it was often necessary to make compromises that were not always in the national interest just to get legislation through.
“In order for us to carry a reform of the labour market or tax system we would often need to make concessions on more value-based areas to the far-right parties in parliament, which were not always healthy for Danish society. We’d like to abandon that system,” he added.
The difficulty, though, is that several of the leftwing parties that gave Frederiksen her majority want a pure red government with no rightwing presence. “To build a bridge between the far left and Lars Løkke [Rasmussen] will require a masterpiece in political engineering,” said Friis.
Frederiksen starts in a strong position. Her Social Democrats had their best election result since 2001, and were more than double the size of the next biggest party, the centre-right Liberals who had their worst showing in 34 years.
This came despite Frederiksen being forced to call an early election because of her handling of the botched cull of Denmark’s 17mn mink last year during the pandemic. Instead, she said the current crises called for a safe pair of hands and touted her decisive actions during the coronavirus crisis.
For many in Denmark, the cause of a centrist government is worth fighting for. “Business would like to see a centre government capable of carrying out much-needed reforms,” said one Danish business leader. Another said: “The influence of tiny parties has been too big for too long.”
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Frederiksen’s predecessor as head of the Social Democrats and prime minister from 2011-15, endorsed the idea of a grand coalition.
“What it could be is a new form of compromise and pragmatism coming back to Danish politics where you exclude the parties from the far right and the far left, and I welcome that very much,” she told the Financial Times.
Given the complexities, experts predict it will take a longer timeframe than usual for Frederiksen to assemble a government. For inspiration, she can look to Sweden where the 2018 government took four months to form.
Friis said Denmark might be heading for a bumpy period owing to its increasing political fragmentation. “We may be on the road to a ‘new normal’ . . . with many changes of government and early elections,” she warned.
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