Denmark holds election following standoff with Trump
Voters in Denmark will decide who runs the Scandinavian country for the next four years in a general election next week, a vote that follows a standoff with US President Donald Trump over the future of the kingdom’s semiautonomous territory of Greenland.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the election last month, apparently hoping that her straight-talking image in the Greenland crisis would win her points with the electorate. If the leader of the center-left Social Democratic party can put together a new government after Tuesday’s vote, she will embark on her third term.
The 48-year-old prime minister has led the European Union and Nato member country since mid-2019. She is known for strong support of Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion and for a restrictive approach to migration.
In her second term, her support waned as the cost of living rose. But she enjoyed a bump in popularity as the government navigated the crisis over Trump’s designs on Greenland, which culminated in January in a short-lived threat to impose tariffs on European nations that opposed his call for US control of the vast Arctic island.
Coalition government
Voters are electing the Folketing, Denmark’s single-chamber parliament.
It has 179 seats, 175 of them for lawmakers from Denmark itself and two each for representatives from thinly populated Greenland and the kingdom’s other semiautonomous territory, the Faroe Islands.
More than 4.3 million people are eligible to have their say next week. Turnout is typically high, and was 84.2 percent in the last election in 2022.
Denmark’s system of proportional representation typically produces coalition governments, traditionally made up of several parties from either left or right.
