{"id":43839,"date":"2026-04-26T01:07:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T01:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/43839\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T01:07:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T01:07:37","slug":"opinion-mette-frederiksen-changed-denmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/43839\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Mette Frederiksen Changed Denmark"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have been doing our best to ignore where we are, geographically speaking, since 1864, when Denmark was forced to cede large swaths of territory to Prussia. After World War II, we welcomed our American protectors with open arms. Denmark was one of the original 12 NATO signatories, and joined the E.E.C., the precursor of the European Union, with a lot of convoluted provisos, in the 1970s. Military spending ticked downward<\/a> for decades, G.D.P. trended<\/a> upward, and in recent years we were perhaps best known for hygge<\/a>, Legos and Ozempic<\/a>. The Pax Americana, in short, has been very, very good to us.<\/p>\n

If war is how Americans learn geography, it has also reminded Danes of our place on the map. Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated claims about the necessity of controlling Greenland revealed just how vulnerable we had allowed ourselves to become. Denmark is a small, low-lying nation of sand, gravel and chalk \u2014 a northern outcrop of Germany and a natural lock at the mouth of the Baltic. To observe that it\u2019s a straight run of a little over 200 miles from Bornholm, a small Danish island southeast of Copenhagen that is popular with tourists, to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, is sobering.<\/p>\n

In just under seven years as prime minister, Ms. Frederiksen has overseen a rearmament that was as much about a political and cultural shift as it was about military procurement<\/a>. The process accelerated after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and again when Mr. Trump\u2019s second term began. Her government dramatically increased spending on defense<\/a> in 2025, expanded conscription<\/a> to include women and lengthened the period of service from four to 11 months.<\/p>\n

Many of Ms. Frederiksen\u2019s reforms had widespread popular support, but by late last year, her party was polling at one of its lowest levels<\/a> in years with voters who were unhappy about the cost of living and an unpopular decision to abolish a public holiday to pay for further defense spending.<\/p>\n

The bump after her standoff with Mr. Trump created an opportunity, which she seized. But neither Mr. Trump, Denmark\u2019s complicated relationship with Greenland nor the increasingly perilous world in which we live has been what voters want to talk about. Instead, they have repeatedly returned to the future of agriculture, climate, education, gas prices and taxing the wealthy. And gossip: Earlier this month one prominent politician \u2014 a rising young star on the right \u2014 admitted to snorting cocaine, and that became the primary topic of conversation for days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We have been doing our best to ignore where we are, geographically speaking, since 1864, when Denmark was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[26210,382,13624,1065,2389,1099,13617,373,13621,5581,13622,74,13623],"class_list":{"0":"post-43839","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mette-frederiksen","8":"tag-defense-and-military-forces","9":"tag-denmark","10":"tag-donald-j","11":"tag-elections","12":"tag-frederiksen","13":"tag-greenland","14":"tag-mette","15":"tag-mette-frederiksen","16":"tag-polls-and-public-opinion","17":"tag-social-democratic-party-denmark","18":"tag-territorial-disputes","19":"tag-trump","20":"tag-united-states-international-relations"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116468334240527903","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}