After having feared during the evening to lose her majority, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, emerges victorious for the moment, with a seat close, at the end of the legislative elections which took place on Tuesday 1er 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.
” Thanks “wrote Ms. Frederiksen, posting a photo of herself smiling on Instagram, her favorite medium. “I am very, very happy”she told the press as she arrived at Parliament with her husband.
Breakthrough of the centrists
The bloc bringing together the right and the extreme right comes in second position with 72 seats and the centrist party of the Moderates brings together 16. It is a performance for this new centrist formation, credited with barely 2% of the 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 election was provoked by the “mink crisis”: a party, supporting the government, had threatened to bring it down if it did not call elections to ensure the confidence of voters after the decision, then declared illegal, to cull the country’s huge herd of mink 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 been a champion of immigration strictness for more than twenty years, including within Ms. Frederiksen’s social democratic party, the election was also marked by an upheaval within the right-wing populist anti-immigration 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.