{"id":44145,"date":"2026-04-26T03:48:39","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T03:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/44145\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T03:48:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T03:48:39","slug":"prime-minister-mette-frederiksen-calls-snap-elections-in-denmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/44145\/","title":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen Calls Snap Elections in Denmark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark said<\/a> on Thursday that snap parliamentary elections would be held next month. The announcement came just weeks after she surged in public opinion polls<\/a> for standing up to President Trump\u2019s threats to take over Greenland<\/a>, a semiautonomous Danish territory. <\/p>\n

Ms. Frederiksen, who became prime minister in 2019 after her party, the Social Democrats, struck a deal<\/a> to form a minority government with other left-leaning parties in Parliament, said the next poll would be held on March 24, more than half a year before her deadline to call such elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs everyone knows, the conflict about Greenland isn\u2019t over yet,\u201d she said in a speech on Thursday to Parliament that amounted to the opening of what is likely to be a quick campaign to keep her job.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump has backed down<\/a> from his original threat to seize Greenland and ruled out the use of force. Ms. Frederiksen, nonetheless, suggested in her speech that the United States, at least during Mr. Trump\u2019s presidency, could become a threat to Denmark\u2019s security and stability<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cDenmark has to continue rearming itself,\u201d she said, pointing to \u201cthe Russian war machine from the east, threats from the west and the risk of terror from the south.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a test of whether standing up to Mr. Trump could pay political dividends.<\/p>\n

Ms. Frederiksen, who has made a name for herself with her refusal to kowtow to Mr. Trump<\/a>, did not directly name the president in her address. But she made several references to the security threats facing her country. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe must define our relationship with the United States,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Greenland\u2019s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has said that Greenlanders would rather stick with Denmark<\/a>, their former colonizer, than join the United States. The Faroe Islands, the other part of the kingdom, also chose to forgo planned talks last month with Denmark<\/a> to discuss boosting their autonomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must secure the future of the Danish kingdom,\u201d Ms. Frederiksen said.<\/p>\n

Within hours, the competition intensified. Three other politicians announced their candidacy for prime minister, including Troels Lund Poulsen, the defense minister who is also the leader of Venstre, a center-right party with the second-most seats in Parliament.<\/p>\n

In a Facebook announcement, he also pointed to the turmoil of the Greenland crisis and directly framed the United States as a threat to Denmark\u2019s safety and security.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe in Denmark and our Kingdom \u2014 we have to defend it,\u201d Mr. Poulsen said in his announcement. \u201cAs a country, we are challenged by Putin from east and Trump from west.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Frederiksen did not say whether she would resign as prime minister if her party lost the largest number of seats. But experts said that calling the elections now would most likely put her and her party in a strong position.<\/p>\n

She had to call elections at any point before November. Before the Greenland crisis, she had been lagging in polls. Late last year, her party lost control of Copenhagen in municipal elections<\/a> for the first time in more than a century, in part because voters were alarmed by the party\u2019s heavy-handed approach to immigration.<\/p>\n

Then, in January, Mr. Trump threatened Greenland. And many thought she handled the crisis well, said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had to call elections very soon anyway,\u201d he said. \u201cSo why not do it now while the Danish population still remembers that she stood up to Donald Trump?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, the head of strategy and great power competition at the Royal Danish Defense College in Copenhagen, also said she might have a short-lived sweet spot, politically speaking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been a rally-around-the-flag effect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Calling a vote in the middle of the Greenland crisis could have been seen as opportunistic or irresponsible, he said. But waiting too long could have meant losing her strategic advantage. It was no coincidence, he said, that the prime minister waited until after Mr. Trump\u2019s State of the Union address<\/a> on Tuesday night. Mr. Trump did not mention Greenland at all.<\/p>\n

If he had, Dr. Rahbek-Clemmensen said, \u201cthe crisis would have been reactivated and I imagine that they wouldn\u2019t have pressed the button.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark said on Thursday that snap parliamentary elections would be held next month.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[382,13624,1065,2389,1099,2783,13617,373,6938,5581,13622,74,13623],"class_list":{"0":"post-44145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mette-frederiksen","8":"tag-denmark","9":"tag-donald-j","10":"tag-elections","11":"tag-frederiksen","12":"tag-greenland","13":"tag-international-relations","14":"tag-mette","15":"tag-mette-frederiksen","16":"tag-politics-and-government","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\/116468967170887891","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44145","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=44145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}