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Danish Liberal leader aims to ‘build confidence’ in latest talks with Frederiksen

Talks between Denmark’s two largest political parties over a potential new government agreement continued at Prime Minister’s residence Marienborg on Monday.

Danish Liberal leader aims to 'build confidence' in latest talks with Frederiksen
Danish Liberal leader Jakob Ellemann-Jensen on Monday as talks to form a new government progress. Photo: Ida Marie Odgaard/Ritzau Scanpix

The Liberal (Venstre) party was engaged in talks with acting Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats on Monday afternoon, broadcaster DR reported.

Liberal leader Jakob Ellemann-Jensen said the latest round of talks would focus on the economy.

“We’ve spoken a lot about that so far. It’s a precondition for everything. And we will also talk about a ‘freedom reform’, meaning freeing citizens within our social welfare system. We will also speak about health reforms,” he said in comments reported by DR.

Ellemann-Jensen was also asked about his working relationship with Frederiksen, whom he said he “could not trust” before elections at the beginning of November.

“Confidence is something you must build. We are working on that, so now I will go in and build confidence and have a discussion about the economy,” he said.

READ ALSO: What does Denmark’s Liberal party want from government negotiations?

The Liberals, the largest party in the ‘blue bloc’ conservative group, ruled out governing with Frederiksen prior to the election, but has since moved to a more open stance.

Suggestions the Liberals may be prepared to enter government with the Social Democrats gained momentum following a Liberal party national conference earlier this month.

After the Red-Green Alliance (Enhedlisten), one of the parties that gave Frederiksen’s red bloc a slim parliamentary majority, was among parties to exit negotiations last week, pressure appears to be building on the Liberals on to find an agreement.

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2024 EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

What’s at stake for Denmark’s political parties in the coming EU elections?

With the Moderate Party at risk of losing its only seat and the Liberal Party facing seeing its number of MEPs halved, Denmark's junior government parties have a lot at stake in the coming EU elections.

What's at stake for Denmark's political parties in the coming EU elections?

Campaigning in Denmark ahead of the EU elections on June 9th has yet to really get going, but the most recent polls suggest that the Moderates and Liberals, the two right of centre parties in the country’s three party grand coalition, have the most to lose.   

A poll last week, carried out by Epinion for Denmark’s state broadcaster DR, brought bad news for the Moderate Party led by former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, with support for the party falling to 4.5 percent from the 7.4 percent the party had in a previous poll from March. This has brought it below the threshold of about 6.5 percent to get a seat in the parliament. 

When the party was founded in 2022, it quickly gained an MEP, after Bergur Løkke Rasmussen, Rasmussen’s son, crossed over from the Liberals. 

But being part of Denmark’s less than popular three-party coalition, together with a series of missteps by the party’s lead European candidate, Stine Bosse, seems to have weighed the upstart party down. Now it’s not only the younger Rasmussen, who is second on the party list, who risks losing his seat, but Bosse as well. 

The Moderates are not the only party to be struggling as a result of taking part in the government, however. 

The Liberals risk seeing the number of MEPs they have in Brussels halved from the four they won in 2019, and if they perform badly when the campaign starts for real, they risk being reduced to a single seat.  

This is the party that came out top in the 2019 European elections, in one of the last triumphs for its then leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen, overtaking the Social Democrats to become the biggest Danish party in Brussels. 

READ ALSO: 

It now looks like the Social Democrats, the only government party which can look relatively optimistically towards June, will take back that position. 

While support for Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's party is plummeting in national election polling, falling to just 19.2 in the most recent Epinion poll, down 30 percent from the 2022 election result, it is doing better in Europe.

According to last week's Epinion poll, the Social Democrats stand to get 20.1 percent of the vote in June, only a slight decline from the 21.5 the party won in the 2019 European elections.  

With Denmark gaining an extra seat in the European Parliament following the UK's exit, this means the party is set to get four MEPs, up from three in the 2019 election. 

It's not only government parties that have reasons to worry. 

The Social Liberal party (Radikale Venstre), promotes itself as Denmark's most pro-EU party, and its former leader, Margrethe Vestager, has risen to become one of the most powerful figures in Brussels. 

But the party is currently set to win just 7 percent of the vote, down from 10 percent in the 2019 European elections, meaning it is likely to lose one of its two MEPs, and is not too far off losing both. 

The Conservative Party, still reeling from the death of its leader, Søren Pape, from a cerebral haemorrhage in March, is also facing a difficult election.

The Conservatives are the only Danish party in the powerful EPP block in Brussels, giving it a seat at the table with the powerful German Christian Democrats,  France's Republican Party, and Spain's Partido Popular.

They have won one seat or more in every European election since Denmark joined in 1979. While last week's Epinion poll also gave it 7 percent of the vote, it also doesn't have far to fall to lose its only seat.  

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