Denmark’s ruling Social Democrats have urged voters to look past their botched handling of a mass cull of farmed mink at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and trust them to lead the country through a deteriorating security situation and the cost of living crisis as Danes prepare to go to the polls.
Centre-left prime minister Mette Frederiksen was forced to call early elections amid the fallout from the mink scandal, where millions of the creatures were killed without a legal basis over fears they could spread new variants of the virus, and many had to be reburied after the bodies resurfaced.
But Frederiksen tried to regain the initiative by suggesting an end to the leftwing and rightwing blocs that have dominated Denmark’s politics and instead proposing a centrist coalition after parliamentary elections that take place on Tuesday.
“We want to have safe hands navigating us through the crisis, through the turbulence,” Jeppe Kofod, the Social Democrat foreign minister, told journalists on Friday.
He said the “deliberate blowing up” of the twin Nord Stream gas pipelines near the country’s territorial waters in the Baltic Sea last month, the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the economic situation were more important than assigning blame for the mink cull.
Frederiksen was heavily criticised by an official commission this summer for ordering the killing of up to 17mn mink without a legal basis, leading to censure from both the rightwing opposition and some of her leftwing backers.
Tuesday’s elections could give Denmark its most fragmented parliament ever as 14 parties vie for seats, with additional groups likely to come from the autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
Frederiksen’s hardline stance on immigration has led to the near-demise of the populist Danish People’s party, which came in second place in 2015 but is now struggling to reach the 2 per cent electoral threshold for entering parliament, according to polls.
But several new parties have been formed with tough anti-immigration policies. They include the Denmark Democrats, led by former immigration minister Inger Støjberg, who was handed a jail sentence last year by an impeachment court after being found guilty of breaching her duties by illegally separating some refugee couples in asylum centres.
Recent opinion polls have consistently given Frederiksen’s leftwing bloc a small lead over the rightwing opposition.
But they also suggest that the Moderates, a new party set up by former centre-right prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, could play the role of kingmaker, holding the balance of power between the left and right. Rasmussen is the only party leader who has not said who he wants to see as prime minister after the elections, saying he would like to negotiate with both sides.
The two main traditional centre-right parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, have rejected Frederiksen’s repeated calls for a centrist coalition.
“Because we are in these exceptional times, we think it would be great to have a bipartisan government,” Kofod said.
He added that there was a strong chance of “a very fragmented parliament”, although several parties were struggling to reach the electoral threshold.
“I envisage it will be very difficult [to form] any government. It could be a long process. Having a lot of parties is complicating the picture,” Kofod said.
Neighbouring Sweden took more than a month to form a government this year, and three months in 2018. Denmark has a tradition of minority governments — the Social Democrats currently rule alone but with support from other leftwing groups in parliament. Kofod urged the other parties to act in the “pragmatic” Danish way.
An average of recent polls gave the leftwing bloc a 48-41 per cent lead over the right, with the Moderates gaining 9 per cent. The Social Democrats are polling at 26 per cent, double that of the next largest party, the opposition Liberals, and are all but certain to become the largest party.
