By Canadian Press

Danish PM: After weeks of talks, deal on centrist govt

Dec 13, 2022 | 3:24 PM

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Acting Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday an agreement has been struck to form a new center-led government after 42 days of talks following the Nov. 1 general election.

Frederiksen said the governing coalition would include her own Social Democrats, the Liberal Party and the newly created Moderate party of former Danish Prime Lars Løkke Rasmussen. It will be presented later this week.

Details of who will be the different get the different Cabinet posts will be revealed Thursday. The agreement between the parties in the government will be made public Wednesday.

“Because different parties go together in a government does not mean that we agree on everything, but we now choose to enter into a working community with each other because that is the most important thing for our country,” Frederiksen after she formally informed Queen Margrethe, the country’s figurehead monarch, on the agreement.

Tuesday’s announcement followed a dramatic election night vote count. It wasn’t until the very end, when the decisive seat flipped and the left-leaning side — the Social Democrats and their allies — retained a majority of 90 seats in the 179-member Danish parliament by just one seat. Frederiksen’s party won 28% of the vote, or 50 seats.

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That put Frederiksen in a strong position, as she could form a government and didn’t have to depend on Løkke Rasmussen and the votes of his Moderates which grabbed 9% or 16 seats.

The last time Denmark was governed by a centrist coalition was in 1978 when the Social Democrats teamed up with the Liberals. That lasted eight months.

Frederiksen was forced to call the vote earlier this year amid the fallout from her government’s contentious decision to cull millions of minks as a pandemic response measure. The cull and chilling images of mass graves of minks haunted Frederiksen since 2020 and eventually led to cracks in the center-left bloc.

The Associated Press