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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Analysis: What does the EU election result mean for Denmark’s general election?

Centrist parties, including Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s Liberals, fared well in Sunday’s EU elections, while the nationalist Danish People’s Party suffered badly. But how might the results affect next week’s general election?

Published: 27 May 2019 13:05 CEST
Analysis: What does the EU election result mean for Denmark’s general election?
Will Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen still be on a high after Denmark's second elections in two weeks? Photo: Thomas Sjørup / Ritzau Scanpix

As well as the centre-right Liberals, small, centre-left parties who have campaigned on prioritizing climate also enjoyed strong performances at Sunday’s EU election.

The success of Rasmussen’s Liberals was perhaps the biggest story of the night, given that it was less expected than the collapse of the Danish People’s Party (DF).

The Danish People’s Party has been involved in scandals over its use of EU funds in recent years and has also seen itself under pressure domestically due to the emergence of new fringe parties, who are seeking to outdo it by taking even harder stances on immigration, DF’s core issue.

As such, the party was expected to struggle, although its loss of over 15 points and three seats in the parliament is dramatic nonetheless.

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The Local's 2019 general election guide to:

But the Liberal Party, which polls suggest will relinquish control of government after the general election, went from two to four EU parliament seats on Sunday and increased its vote share from 16.7 percent in the 2014 EU election to 23.5 percent in 2019.

“All signs suggest that we have had the best EU election ever,” Rasmussen said on Sunday night.

The PM will surely be hoping to ride the wave of the EU election performance into the June 5th general election, which is now just nine days away.

READ ALSO: EU elections: Danish centrists perform strongly as nationalists dealt huge defeat

The flipside of Sunday’s results for Rasmussen is that the other parties that enjoyed a good night are the ones which are opposing him in the general election.

Although the Social Democrats, who would have hoped to become the biggest Danish party in the EU following DF’s collapse, failed in that objective, prime ministerial candidate Mette Frederiksen’s party did fare well, going from 19.1 points to 21.5, albeit not enough to gain a seat.

Meanwhile, the Social Liberals, Socialist People’s Party and the left wing Red-Green Alliance all increased their vote shares and number of seats.

Right-of-centre parties – the Liberals, Conservatives, Liberal Alliance and Danish People’s Party – have seen their overall share of the EU parliamentary vote shrink from 55 percent to 43 percent, as Politiken’s political editor Anders Bæksgaard points out.

If that trend is mirrored in the general election, Rasmussen will be in trouble, despite his own party’s apparent rejuvenation after Sunday’s vote.

Climate is high on the agenda of many Danish voters in both elections, while the country’s populace seems to have taking a generally more pro-EU stance in the light of the United Kingdom’s Brexit turmoil, hence the support for moderate parties on the left and right.

But other issues – and parties – will surely come into play during the final straight of the long general election campaign. More discussion of immigration and refugees will probably benefit conservative parties to some extent, although this is harder to predict than usual: DF, the quintessential anti-immigration party, is under pressure from all sides after a very poor EU election result and is haemorrhaging voters to both the Social Democrats and far-right fringe parties.

Rasmussen will have to channel the momentum from last night’s result into issues that move voters in a national, and not just a European, context if he is to turn the tide and pull off a second election surprise in as many weeks.

READ ALSO: EU elections in Denmark: 'Free movement should also be fair movement'

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Down with Danish hygge – Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

Hygge, the Danish art of getting cosy, has taken the world by storm. But the Swedish equivalent is refreshingly different, says David Crouch 

Published: 20 December 2022 08:41 CET
Updated: 6 August 2023 11:03 CEST
OPINION: Down with Danish hygge - Sweden’s mys is more real, fun and inclusive

It is around seven years since the Danish word hygge entered many of our languages. Hygge, pronounced hue-guh and generally translated as the art of cosiness, exploded almost overnight to become a global lifestyle phenomenon.

Hygge dovetailed with mindfulness and fed into other popular trends such as healthy eating, and even adult colouring books. “The Little Book of Hygge” became a publishing sensation and has been translated into 15 languages. It was swiftly followed by a second book from its author, “My Hygge Home”, one of dozens on the market. 

There is nothing wrong with new ways to relax, and certainly no harm in identifying them with Scandinavia. But as a guide to living your life, there are some problems with hygge. 

First, the original meaning of the word is too broad and subtle to enable a clear grasp of the concept among non-Danes. This probably helps to explain its appeal – hygge is an empty bottle into which you can pour whatever liquid you like.

Patrick Kingsley, who wrote a book about Denmark several years before the hygge hype, was “surprised to hear people describe all sorts of things” as hygge. Danes, he said, would use the word when talking about a bicycle, a table, or even an afternoon stroll. 

So it is hardly surprising that, outside Denmark, hygge is applied rather indiscriminately. Last week the New York Times devoted an entire article to achieving hygge while riding the city’s subway, of all places. “A train, after all, is basically a large sled that travels underground, in the dark,” it said, trying too hard to find a hint of Nordic-ness on the overcrowded railway.

READ ALSO: Danish word of the day – hyggeracisme

Hygge has become an exotic and mysterious word to describe more or less anything you want. It is as if someone decided that the English word “nice” had a magical meaning that contained the secret to true happiness, and then the whole non-English speaking world made great efforts to achieve the perfect feeling of “nice”. 

A second problem with hygge is that, in Denmark itself, it seems to operate like a badge of Danishness that can only be enjoyed by Danes themselves – a kind of cultural border that outsiders cannot cross. You can walk down a Danish street in the dark, one journalist was told, look through the windows and spot who is Danish and who is foreign just by whether their lighting is hygge or not.

When writer Helen Russell spent a year in Denmark, she was intrigued by hygge and asked a lifestyle coach about it. “It’s hard to explain, it’s just something that all Danes know about,” she was told. How could an immigrant to Denmark get properly hygge, Russell asked? “You can’t. It’s impossible,” was the unhelpful reply. It can’t be a coincidence that the far-right Danish Peoples Party has put a clear emphasis on hygge, as if immigration is a threat to hygge and therefore to Danish-ness itself. 

READ ALSO: It’s official – Hygge is now an English word

Outside Denmark, this exclusivity has taken on another aspect: where are all the children? Where amid the hygge hype are the bits of lego on the floor, the mess of discarded clothes, toys and half-eaten food, the bleeping iPads and noisy TVs? “Hygge is about a charmed existence in which children are sinisterly absent,” noted the design critic for the Financial Times. It’s as if the Pied Piper of hygge has spirited them away so you can get truly cosy. 

But there is a bigger problem with hygge. It is largely an invention, the work of some clever marketing executives. After spotting a feature about hygge on the BBC website, two of London’s biggest publishers realised this was “a perfect distillation of popular lifestyle obsessions”. They set out to find people who could write books for them on the subject, and so two bestsellers were born, spawning a host of imitations. 

Sweden has a different word that means roughly the same thing: mys (the noun) and mysig (the adjective). There have even been some half-hearted attempts to sell mys to a foreign audience in the same way as hygge. But the real meaning of mys in Swedish society is rather different, it seems to me. The reason for this, I think, is that mys has become so firmly identified with Friday nights, or fredagsmys – the “Friday cosy”. 

Fredagsmys is a collective sigh of relief that the working / school week is over, and now it is time for the whole family to come together in front of some trashy TV with a plate of easy finger-food. The word first appeared in the 1990s, entered the dictionary in 2006, and became a semi-official national anthem three years later with this joyous ad for potato crisps:

In this portrayal, mys is radically different to hygge. It is a celebration of the ordinary, witty and multi-cultural, featuring green-haired goths and a mixed-race family with small children. Food is central to fredagsmys, and what is the typical food of choice? Mexican, of course! Not a herring in sight.

Why Mexican? It seems nobody is really sure, but tacofredag now has roots in Swedish society. Tacos, tortillas, and all the accompanying spices and sauces take up a whole aisle of the typical Swedish supermarket. Swedes are accustomed to eating bread with various bits and pieces on top, according to a specialist in Swedish food culture, while the Swedish tradition of smörgåsbord (open sandwiches) makes a buffet meal seem natural. The fussiness of tacos is even reminiscent of a kräftskiva crayfish party.

There is no cultural exclusivity here. On the contrary, fredagsmys food could equally be Italian, North American, Middle-Eastern, British or French. And children are absolutely central to a good Friday cosy. 

With Swedish mys, everybody is welcome. Get cosy and relax, but do it by mixing and getting messy, rather than retreating into pure, perfect, rarified isolation. There is a time and a place for hygge. But the Swedish version is more real, more fun, and more inclusive.

David Crouch is the author of Almost Perfekt: How Sweden Works and What Can We Learn From It. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

 
 
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