Danish left bloc clings to power with razor-thin election victory
Copenhagen, Denmark - Denmark’s left-wing bloc led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reached out to the centre for broader collaboration on Wednesday after winning a oneseat majority in a nail-biter general election.
Frederiksen’s five-party ‘red’ bloc had looked set to lose its majority as vote counting wore on throughout Tuesday evening, but as the last votes were tallied, the bloc eked out the 87 seats it needed in mainland Denmark.
Together with another three seats from the autonomous overseas territories of the Faroe
Islands and Greenland, the bloc holds a total of 90 of parliament’s 179 seats.
Opinion polls had predicted a historically weak election for the Social Democrats, but they instead gained two seats compared to the 2019 election, winning 27.5 per cent of votes.
“Social democracy had its best election in over 20 years,” Frederiksen said in a speech to campaign supporters early on Wednesday. “We are a party for all of Denmark,” she added.
The right-wing ‘blue’ bloc - an informal liberal and conservative alliance supported by three populist parties - won 72 seats in mainland Denmark and one in the Faroe Islands.
The photo-finish victory scuppered the hopes of a newly-created centrist party, the Moderates, of playing the role of kingmaker - an outcome that had looked likely until Frederiksen secured a majority.
The party was created only months earlier by former twotime prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who looked set to once again return to the centre of Danish politics following a campaign in which both the left and right had competed for his favour.
Polling at barely two per cent of voter support two months ago, the Moderates won more than nine per cent of votes, and Lokke Rasmussen insisted he wanted to be ‘the bridge’ between the left and right. “It’s not red or blue, it’s about common sense,” he told cheering supporters in a speech on Tuesday evening, while declaring that a new government was a certainty.
During the campaign, Frederiksen floated the idea of a leftright coalition government led by herself.