By Jørgen Elklit (Aarhus University)

It was a little surprising that Danish Prime Minister, Ms Mette Frederiksen, in late February called a snap election to the parliament (Folketinget) to be held on March 24th. The four year parliamentary term would only end in late October, and her slim majority coalition government was not doing too badly. But the three participating parties – The Social Democrats, the center oriented The Moderates, and liberal-conservative Venstre – were nevertheless preparing themselves for an electoral campaign, where they expectedly would not form a united front.
Instead, they would fight individually for the best possible future parliamentary position, where the Social Democrats had to consider recent losses to more leftist parties in both European Parliamentary and local elections, and where Venstre was under constant pressure from other conservative and more right-wing parties. The Moderates – defining themselves as the party in the very center – could only hope that they would be able to control the balance in parliament between parties to the left and the right.
Ms Frederiksen was maybe hoping that the recent turmoil with US president Trump over the possession of Greenland, which she had handled well, would allow her to benefit from some kind of positive “rallying around the flag”-effect in an election, even though the threat from Trump had maybe weakened because of his engagement elsewhere.
Be that as it may, the election was called, and there no problems in having everything ready for a well administered election in three weeks’ time.

The institutional context
The electoral system in Denmark is a proportional representation (PR) two-tier system. 135 seats are allocated by the d’Hondt seat allocation method in 10 multi-member constituencies, while hile 40 compensatory seats are used to make up for the differences between (1) the parties’ overall entitlement based on the allocation of all 175 Danish seats in proportion to the parties’ total national sum of votes by using the Hare quota (with largest remainders) and (2) their sum of seats won in the 10 multi-member constituencies. Two seats are filled from Greenland and two from the Faroe Islands, so that Folketinget is a 179 member body. The formal electoral threshold is 2 per cent.
Folketinget was more fragmented than ever already prior to this election, as 11 parties had won seats in 2022, and the effective number of parties had gone up to more than 7. All 11 parties ran again, together with a new radical-right party.

The electoral campaign
Campaign themes were not surprising for someone who has followed Danish politics over the years. Main themes were climate and pollution issues, focusing not least on water pollution caused to some degree by farmers over-fertilizing, animal welfare, not least in connection with pig farming, issues related to basic education, immigration and criminal behaviour of foreigners residing in Denmark, support for Ukraine and its fight against Russia (a topic most parties agreed on), the future structure of the kingdom, i.e. in particular the position of Greenland within the realm, how to tax the wealthiest in order to decrease rising inequality, future retirement systems, and who was actually responsible for the government’s cancelation of a well-establish national holiday.
A number of opinion polls showed very scattered pictures and in any case that all three parties in Ms Frederiksen’s convenience coalition government would suffer losses, the Social Democrats probably most so. That was also the end result when published on election night.

The electoral results
The Social Democrats had their worst result for more than 100 years (21.9 per cent, down from 27.5 per cent in 2022), which gave them 38 seats in parliament. The two other governing parties also lost some seats, while winners were parties both to the left and to the right. Socialist People’s Party became the second largest party with 11.6 per cent of the vote and 20 seats, while the right-wing Danish People’s Party made a remarkable recovery and went from 2.9 per cent in 2022 to 9.1 per cent now (and 16 seats). Five parties to the right of the government ended up with between 10 and 18 seats, to which must be added 4 seats to the political newcomer, the Citizens’ Party.
This all means that Folketinget has become much more fragmented than ever before, while the level of disproportionality (between vote and seat shares) is smaller than ever, a modest 0.5 using Gallagher’s index of disproportionality.

The aftermath
Negotiations about the formation of the next government will start immediately. At the moment of writing it remains to be seen who will first be given the opportunity to investigate the government formation possibilities, but it might well be Ms Frederiksen. But it will in any case be a demanding challenge to form a government, and it might take as long as in 2022, where it – for the first time ever – took a little more than a month to form the now out-going government.

Photo source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmarks-left-wing-bloc-leads-election-lacks-majority-exit-polls-show-2026-03-24/