Under pressure from an ultimatum of his allies, the social democratic Prime Minister, puts Frederiksen, urgently summoned general elections that promise to be tight. No less than fourteen parties have been in the running, a record since 1987.
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Accused, the Danish Prime Minister, puts Frederiksen, had no choice. Her allies in Parliament, the Social Liberals (Radikale Venstre), threatened her with a vote of distrust this Thursday, October 6, if she did not summon the general elections before. Avoiding this humiliation, the leader of the Social Democrats announced on Wednesday that the ballot would take place on the 1 er November, thus kicking a flash campaign, in a context particularly tense interior and geopolitics.
In Denmark, the outgoing prime ministers have an advantage: they decide when the voters are called to the ballot box, provided that it is within four years following the last ballot. In May 2019, the Liberal Lars Lokke Rasmussen, at the head of the government since 2015, had taken advantage of the hospitalization of M me Frederiksen to launch the electoral campaign. Suffering from severe gastroenteritis, it had missed the first major televised debate, which traditionally brings together parties of parties, the same evening of the convocation of voters.
This time again, Put Frederiksen would probably have preferred to wait. Her mandate was to end in June 2023. But she had a “pistol on the temple”, summarizes the political scientist Martin Vinæs Larsen. The owner of the Social Democrats recognized that the chosen moment was far from ideal. In Denmark, dissatisfaction has risen to inflation at its highest level for forty years. The economic crisis threatens. And, since September 26, the Scandinavian kingdom faces an unprecedented situation, after the explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines, located in its exclusive economic zone, off the island of Bornholm.
Commission of inquiry on the visons
M Me Frederiksen was not taken away. The leader of the Social-Liberal Party, Sofie Carsten Nilen, had presented her ultimatum this summer, July 2. “A new start is necessary,” she wrote, in a message on Facebook, arguing polarization on the political scene, after the publication, four days earlier, of the 1,600 pages report of the commission of inquiry on the visons.
For almost a year, a judge, a law professor and two lawyers interviewed a hundred people, including the Prime Minister, the members of his government and his cabinet. The objective: to establish the responsibilities on the decision which led Frederiksen on November 4, 2020, to decree the slaughter of the entire herd of Danish visons, or more than 15 million animals, in order to avoid The propagation of a variant of Sars-Cov-2 observed in these mammals.
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