COPENHAGEN, May 8 — Talks to form a government in Denmark after inconclusive elections in March failed yesterday and the king appointed a new negotiator to replace Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
The coalition-building process was expected to take weeks, as neither the left nor the right bloc won a majority in the March 24 election that left parliament deeply splintered.
Frederiksen, whose Social Democrats registered their weakest score since 1903 but remained the biggest party by far, had been initially tasked by King Frederik X to lead the negotiations.
The king yesterday asked the head of the liberal Venstre party Troels Lund Poulsen, to “lead the negotiations with a view to forming a government,” the palace said.
His mandate involves negotiating the formation of a government without the participation of the Social Democrats and the Moderates, the palace said.
“The Danes... have composed the (parliament) in such a way that a right-wing government can absolutely be formed. It may very well be that what we are seeing now is in fact the beginning of that,” said Frederiksen, after a meeting with the king on Friday afternoon.
The traditional far-right party, the Danish People’s Party which has heavily influenced policy since the late 1990s but slumped in the 2022 election, more than tripled its result to 9.1 percent of votes.
The three anti-immigration groups together garnered 17 percent, a stable figure for Denmark’s populist right over the past two decades. — AFP
