Danish PM's party wins election, but no majority

Camille Bas Wohlert, Agence France-Presse

Denmark's Social Democrats, led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, finished first in Tuesday's general election but posted their weakest showing in more than 120 years and the left-wing bloc failed to secure a majority. With all votes counted in metropolitan Denmark, the left bloc was credited with 84 seats in the 179-seat parliament and the right with 77, while 90 are needed for a majority. The centrist Moderate party, headed by Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, became kingmaker with 14 seats, and thorny negotiations are expected in the coming weeks to build a coalition government.

Frederiksen, who has been in office since 2019, told cheering supporters that she was "ready to take on the responsibility of serving as Denmark's prime minister again for the next four years". She noted however that "there is little to suggest that forming a government will be easy."

Moments earlier, Lokke said he wanted to see a cross-bloc coalition — even though all three parties in Frederiksen's unprecedented left-right government in power since 2022 lost ground in the election. "We must not be divided. We must not be red (left-wing). We must not be blue (right-wing). We have to work together," he said.

Coalition partner Troels Lund Poulsen of the Liberal Party ruled out forming a new government with the Social Democrats. "Either we have a centre-right government, or we go in opposition," he told supporters. Frederiksen, seen as the favourite going into the elections, has been praised for her leadership after fending off US President Donald Trump's repeated demands to annex Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory he claims the United States needs for national security reasons.

The prime minister spent part of election day in Aalborg, her electoral stronghold in the country's northwest, with Greenlanders living in Denmark. Traditionally Denmark's biggest party, the Social Democrats were credited with just 21.8 per cent of votes, their lowest score since 1903 and down from 27.5 per cent in 2022. "We were expecting to lose ground, that's normal when you run for a third time," Frederiksen acknowledged.

"Of course I wish we would have gotten more votes." Green Left leader Pia Olsen Dyhr said meanwhile that her party's "historic" strong score — making it now the second-biggest party on the left — showed Danes had given them a mandate and she was "ready to negotiate".

"We must prioritise welfare, we must prioritise the green transition. And if we can't do that, then we will not enter government. Then we will be in opposition." The anti-immigration Danish People's Party, which has heavily influenced policy since the late 1990s but slumped in the 2022 election, more than tripled its result to 9.1 per cent of votes. "A tripling of votes is a remarkable expression of the Danish people in support of my party," party leader Morten Messerschmidt said.

"We are all awaiting now what's going to happen in France, we are awaiting what's happening in Hungary, in the Netherlands and not least of course the United Kingdom with Nigel Farage." Four seats in Denmark's parliament are held by its two autonomous territories — two for Greenland, where votes have not yet been counted, and two for the Faroe Islands, where one went to each bloc. The election campaign has generated more interest than usual in Greenland, where 27 candidates vied for the two seats.

"I think it's the most important election for the Danish parliament in Greenland in history," Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in Nuuk. "We are in a time where we have a superpower trying to acquire us, take us, control us," he added, stressing that the territory still found itself in a "serious situation".

"I think the most important thing that all the parties in Greenland have agreed on is that we need to work together, whoever gets elected for the parliament," he said.

In Denmark, the row over the vast Arctic island has not been central in the campaign, focusing instead on domestic issues like inflation, the welfare state, the environment and immigration. As prime minister, Frederiksen has advocated further tightening migration policy in order to quell support for the far-right. "The election has also shown that there remains a very broad majority in the new Folketing in favour of a strict immigration policy in Denmark," she said. "We must control the number of people coming here."