Frederiksen’s left-wing bloc won 28 percent of the vote and exactly the 90 seats needed for a majority, thanks to three mandates from Greenland and the Faroe Islands, after a tight election on Tuesday night. On Wednesday morning, Frederiksen repeated her campaign promise to try to form a centrist coalition between left and right parties and said her current government would resign. “The Social Democrats went to the polls to form a broad government. If the majority of parties show me [as prime minister] I’ll see if it happens. Because that’s what’s good for Denmark,” Frederiksen said after her Social Democrats secured their best election results in two decades. The result is a major victory for Frederiksen, who was forced to call a snap election after her government’s botched cull of 17 million mink last year. Frederiksen, widely regarded as the most powerful prime minister in Denmark’s history, highlighted her decisive response to the Covid-19 pandemic during the campaign and argued that the Scandinavian country needed a safe pair of hands to guide it through cost of living crisis and heightened tensions with Russia in the Baltic Sea. Until now, Danish politics has adhered strictly to the separation of left and right blocs that have taken turns to govern. But both Frederiksen and her predecessor Lars Løkke Rasmussen said they would like to see a centrist government involving the main parties from both the left and the right to minimize the influence of smaller parties, particularly those of extreme parties. Rasmussen’s Moderate party, founded just six months ago, has become the third-largest group in parliament, with 16 seats, and has said it could support either a left-wing or a right-wing government. Former Social Democrat prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt told the Financial Times: “It could be a new way of doing things. We have never had so much discussion about this middle ground and finding a compromise in the middle. This is a very interesting night in Danish politics.” Rasmussen said on Wednesday that Frederiksen should be given the first chance to form a government. Jakob Engel-Schmidt, political chief of the Moderates, told the FT that his party wanted a government with parties on the left and the right. “With the security situation in Europe, the energy crisis, the inflation crisis, we believe that politicians need to come together and make some reforms that take care of the welfare state for the future,” he added. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the former prime minister, says he would like a government made up of right and left parties © Martin Sylvest/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images But Frederiksen will face a difficult negotiating task. Several of the smaller parties on the left want him to form a purely left-wing government rather than include moderate or center-right parties. At least 14 parties applied to enter parliament and 12 won seats – with four more groups likely to come from the Faroe Islands and Greenland – leading to one of the most fragmented political landscapes in Europe. Frederiksen moved her Social Democrats sharply to the right on issues such as immigration before the previous election, which caused support for the populist Danish People’s Party to collapse. The second most popular party in 2015, when one in five Danes supported them, the Danish People’s Party passed the 2 percent threshold needed to enter parliament on Tuesday, its worst ever result. The main party of the right, the Liberals, Rasmussen’s former party, also had its worst result in 34 years, at about 13 percent.
