The rules of the game; understanding the Danish political system
Are you new to Denmark? Or just still puzzled about how everything works? Find out how the Danish political system works here.
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By Inger Stokkink
Denmark is just your regular western democracy. It has proportional representation, allowing parliament, called Folketinget in Danish, to reflect the various political orientations in Danish society through a multitude of different parties.
The multitude of parties makes co-operation in coalitions between parties a necessity, as no single party has enough seats to rule on its own. This co-operation takes many forms, such as parties declaring before an election whether they are joining the red or the blue block.
But this co-operation really starts to count after the elections, when election promises are tested against political reality, and political parties involved in forming a government have to compromise in order to build up a coalition.
Most Danish governments are minority coalitions, relying on a support party in Folketinget so that most of the government’s political issues are certain of a majority when it comes down to voting.
A government period lasts for a maximum of four years. The last general election took place on 1 November 2022.
Since 26 June 2019, Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, had been at the head of a minority government supported by there “red parties”; Socialistisk Folkeparti, Enhedslisten and Radikale Venstre. In the coming weeks she will be heading the negotiations with all political parties to find out with whom she can form a majority government.
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Form follows function
The way Danish politics are organised influences the political culture just as much as the political outcome.
Rune Stubager, professor of political science at Aarhus University, and a frequent commentator in Danish media, helps to clarify this:
“In the proportional system, the electoral threshold defines how many parties there are. And actually, the electoral threshold in Denmark is quite low: two percent of the total number of votes.
Also, if you have enough votes in just one storkreds then you also have the right to claim a seat in the Folketing. This explains why there are relatively many parties in Folketinget, and why political parties are destined to work together.”
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How to play with the parties
Although it is fairly easy to get elected in Denmark because of the low electoral threshold, there are some hurdles that a new party has to jump in order to get its name on the ballot.
“The first hurdle is that they have to gather around 20,000 voter’s signatures, vetted by their municipalities, the second is that they have to participate in the Folketing election, and that requires some party organisation,” explains Stubager.
”There are two types of new parties: outsider parties and splinter parties. You’ll see that the most successful new parties are the splinter parties, parties that have broken away from other, more established parties, where candidates already have gained political experience.”
Current examples of new parties are Danmarksdemokraterne, headed by Inger Støjberg, former party member of Venstre and ex-minister in the 2016-2019 right wing government and Moderaterna formed by Lars Løkke Rasmussen, ex Prime Minister and head of Venstre until 2019.
Forlig and fællesskab
Two words you hear a lot in Danish politics are forlig, political pacts between parties, and fællesskab, community feeling and cooperation.
For those who haven’t grown up with these words, Christine Cordsen, former political commentator for Jyllands Posten, currently working for DR, says about their importance and how they shape this very Danish political culture:
“I think that what makes Danish political culture special is that it is shaped by a deeply-ingrained tendency to co-operate, also across party lines. This has been going on for about a hundred years, and it has to do with Denmark having mostly had minority governments. So there was a direct need to co-operate to make things work. An effect of this attitude is the comparative stability of Danish politics.
Another sign of this is the forligskultur: picking out controversial issues, for example the school system and making a pact with a large majority in Folketinget that transcends party lines and time horizons, a pact that even the next Folketing election cannot easily undo. These pacts are binding and contracting parties have a veto right, so it cannot be undone lightly.”
“But it shows in a different way, too. There’s a strong sense of fællesskab among Folketing members, a strong sense of collegiality and even long-standing friendships across party lines,” says Christine Cordsen about the political culture at parliament.
Udlændingepolitik – immigration policy
There are three themes that keep on coming back in the present political debate: the national economy, especially economic growth, and the growth of the public sector; welfare state topics such as health, education and taking care of the elderly.
Finally, there is ‘udlændingepolitik’, which translates literally as ‘foreigner policy’ but is more correctly described as immigration policy.
“Opinion polls show that a majority of Danes wish to have a strict immigration policy, or at least that the present rules will not be softened up,” says Christine Cordsen. And she adds that: “Immigration politics, and the way these are discussed, have gradually changed over the last twenty years. Things that were outrageous to say back then are quite normal now.
“Even the social democrats, Socialdemokraterne, now favour fairly strict rules concerning immigration, and this has met no great internal opposition, unlike before. Now Venstre, instead of Socialdemokraterne, has heated internal debates about immigrants and the way they are treated in Denmark. In that sense you could say that the “middle” has moved to the right,” she says explaining the evolution.
“The tone of the debate and the way immigrants are being talked about splits Venstre’s party members. On the one hand, they think it is problematic that there are immigrants and refugees who, after considerable time spent in Denmark, still have difficulty speaking Danish, still have not found work, and keep to themselves instead of reaching out to Danish society. And this affects their children’s careers in school, too.
On the other hand, there are many Danes and Danish companies, who want to attract labour forces from abroad for various reasons. If the tone towards immigrants becomes too harsh, this might scare immigrants away, which is not what they want.
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Left is right!
Are you puzzled about why the right-wing party Venstre is called venstre, which means ‘left’ in Danish. Here is the rather simple – even if strange – explanation.
“It has to do with the representatives in the French National Assembly, right after the French Revolution,” Rune Stubager explains. “The representatives, who were most reform-minded and against privilege, in other words classical-liberal, were seated to the left.
The Danish representatives who followed this way of thinking, took over the word ‘left’ to signify their reformist, liberal outlook, in Danish venstre.
They were the first to form a political party, and kept the name Venstre. Later on, when the social-democrats entered the political scene, and the political scale, so to say, was stretched to the left, Venstre was no longer left-wing. But the name stuck anyway.”
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Number of seats at the 1 November 2022 general elections per party:
Red parties also the so- called RED BLOCK
Socialdemokratiet (S) 50 seats with 27.5 % of votes
Enhedslisten (EL) 9 seats with 5.1% of votes
Socialistisk Folkeparti (SF) 15 seats with 8.3 % of votes
Alternativet (ALT) 6 seats with 3.3 % of votes
Radikale Venstre (RV) 7 seats with 3.8 % of votes
Not declared either red or blue
Moderaterne ( New in 2022) 16 seats with 9.3 % of votes
Blue parties also so-called BLUE BLOCK
Dansk Folkeparti (DF) 5 seats with 2.6 percent of votes
Venstre (V) 23 seats with 13.3 percent of votes
Danmarksdemokraterne (New in 2022) 14 seats with 8.1 percent of votes
Liberal Alliance (LA) 14 seats with 7.9 percent of votes
Det Konservative Folkeparti (KF) 10 seats with 5.5 percent of votes
Nye Borgerlige 6 seats with 3.7 percent of votes
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Key words in Danish politics
- Folketinget: is the name of Denmark’s parliament. It resides in Christiansborg, which is also lovingly known as ‘Borgen’, a palace on a little island in Copenhagen.
- Mandat (mandater): seat(s) in Parliament.
- Blok (blå blok/ rød blok): these are established coalitions of parties. The ‘blå blok‘ (blue block), also known as ‘de borgerlige‘ (the ‘bourgeois’), are liberals, conservatives and other right-wing parties. The ‘rød blok‘ (red block) are social democrats, liberal democrats and other left-wing parties. Each block supports a candidate for the position as statsminister (prime minister).
- Forlig: this is a pact between a majority of parties, which in practice means parties from both the ‘rød’ and the ‘blå’ blok. In this pact parties agree to policy guidelines and laws concerning systemic change in big issues such as education, health, and even constitutional matters.
- Dronningerunde (Queen’s round): this refers to the consultation of all party leaders by the Queen, directly after the outcome of elections. After the Dronningerunde, the Queen appoints usually one of the two statsminister candidates to form a government.
- Kaffeklub: ‘the coffee club’. Informal meetings of factions within political parties themselves, where party policy is ‘pre-cooked’.
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