Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, presented her resignation to Queen Margrethe on Wednesday, thus setting in motion the negotiation process to form a new government after the left-wing coalition she leads won Tuesday’s elections.
«We went into the campaign with a promise to form a broad coalition. It seems that the Danes have endorsed that and I hope we can do that,» Frederiksen told reporters Wednesday, reports Danish daily ‘Jyllands-Posten’.
Frederiksen and his partners in the ‘red bloc’ have managed at the last moment to secure a majority in an exciting election thanks to the results that came from the North Atlantic territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, thus leaving in nothing the first polls that questioned that they would achieve it.
The opposition formed by the right-wing parties have added a total of 73 deputies, while the newly created Moderates party has won 16 seats in its first elections barely five months after it started operating. Turnout reached 84.1 percent, the lowest since 1990.
Red-Green Alliance spokeswoman Mai Villadsen has called on Prime Minister Frederiksen to stay within the ‘red bloc’ in her quest to form a new government, after she hinted at a new executive more towards the center.
«We have to turn up the heat in the upcoming negotiations, because they are going to be really decisive for our country,» said Villadsen, who acknowledged that it will be difficult to find common ground between his party and Moderates.
During the first hours of the vote count Frederiksen appeared to have lost her majority, which would have forced her to sit at the negotiating table with former prime minister and Moderates founder Lars Lokke Rasmussen, with whom she spoke before the election of a grand coalition spanning the entire political spectrum as has not been seen in Denmark in more than four decades.
That grand coalition has enemies not only among the forces on the left, but also among the more conservative opposition. The leader of the Liberals, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, has already ruled out such a partnership.
Early general elections were held in Denmark on Tuesday after the Social Liberal Party – the governing partner of the Social Democrats – forced Frederiksen to bring forward the vote in exchange for not presenting a motion of censure.
The economic management of the country at a convulsive moment for Europe as a whole due to the war in Ukraine, added to a report against the government’s management of the mink crisis, slaughtered by a mutation of the coronavirus, were the main arguments for the pressure of the government partners.
Frederiksen finally agreed in early October to call elections eight months before the expiration of the current legislature, in which, after the 2019 elections, the Social Democrats reached the government with the support of the Social Liberal Party and other progressive forces such as Green Left and the Red-Green Alliance.
