Christiansborg Palace or Borgen, the Danish Parliament Building. Photo: Hayden Blackey, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence

In late February, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called a general election for March 24. Observers expected that the three-party government led by the Social Democrats would suffer severe losses and lose its majority at the election. At the same time, they believed that Frederiksen and the Social Democrats would still have an advantage in the government formation negotiations that would follow the election, as the centre-right and the radical right were too fragmented and characterized by internal conflicts to present a credible alternative.

The likely outcome of the government formation, however, was much harder to predict. Would Frederiksen go for a single-party minority government, would she aim for a minority coalition including one or more of the left-wing and centre parties, or would she try to form a majority coalition with the centre parties and the parties of the mainstream right?

Alternatively, would Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of the centrist Moderates, eventually join the centre-right and radical right and opt for a coalition led by the Liberal leader, Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen? Doing so would require overcoming deep political and personal conflicts between Rasmussen and Morten Messerschmidt, leader of the radical right Danish People’s Party.

Forming a government in a multiparty system is never easy. The Folketing (Danish parliament) elected on March 24 has 12 parties, the same number as the outgoing Folketing, but the distribution of votes and seats changed significantly. The Social Democrats remain the largest party, but they won only 21.8 per cent of the vote, down from 27.5 per cent in 2022 and their lowest share of votes since the introduction of proportional representation in 1918. Their losses were especially heavy among younger and working-class voters. The two other parties in the governing coalition – the centre-right Liberals and the Moderates – suffered similar losses.

With four parties winning around 10 per cent of the vote, two parties winning around 8 per cent and the remaining parties winning between 2 and 6 per cent, Denmark now has the second-most fragmented parliament in Europe, surpassed only by Belgium. To reach a majority, at least four and realistically five or six parties are needed. This complicates the formation of a new government. It has meant that Denmark’s frequent minority governments have been kept in office by parties outside of government.

In the first round of negotiations, Mette Frederiksen was given the task of exploring the possibility of forming a government led by the Social Democrats. However, Lars Løkke Rasmussen withdrew his support for Frederiksen after more than five weeks of negotiations. In the second round, Troels Lund Poulsen was given the mandate, but his prospects were limited by the Danish People’s Party’s declaration in advance that it would not support a government that included the Moderates.

As a result of these reciprocal blockades, Denmark – as of May 17 when I am writing – is now in the longest government formation process in its modern history.

TABLE 1: DANISH ELECTION RESULTS

Note: This does not include the four seats allocated to parties in Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

A fragmented political landscape

Danish politics follows a relatively straightforward left-right pattern (table 1), with class and the urban-rural divide as the main underlying factors. To the left of the Social Democrats, support for the green Alternative Party, the Red-Green Alliance and the Socialist People’s Party is concentrated among middle-class voters living in the major cities and employed in the public sector. In 2026 the parties in combination won 20.5 per cent of the vote – up from 16.7 per cent in 2022 – with the Socialist People’s Party as the largest of the three.

The two centrist parties, the Social Liberals and the Moderates, both attract upper-middle-class voters, with Social Liberal voters more left-leaning and Moderate voters more right-leaning. In combination, they remained steady with 13 per cent of the vote. The Social Liberals made some inroads among Social Democratic voters, while the Moderates lost voters to the mainstream centre-right parties. Still, the Moderates hold the balance of power in the incoming Folketing, just as they did in the outgoing one.

The mainstream centre-right consists of the Liberals, with their strongholds in agrarian communities in Jutland, along with the Conservatives and the Liberal Alliance, which attract middle- and upper-middle-class voters, especially in and around Copenhagen. Together they won 27.1 per cent of the vote in 2026, just up from 26.7 per cent in 2022. Here the major story was that the Liberals lost heavily to the two other centre-right parties in the major cities.

Finally, the three parties of the radical right – the Danish People’s Party, the Denmark Democrats and the Citizens’ Party – won 17 per cent of the vote, up from 14.4 per cent in 2022. A strong radical right has been a feature of modern Danish politics since the turn of the century, but the past decade has been characterized by extreme volatility, with the Danish People’s Party winning 21 per cent of the vote in 2015 only to collapse as a result of internal conflicts in the early 2020s, nearly losing parliamentary representation in 2022 before bouncing back in 2026.

Common features of the parties of the radical right are that they appeal to voters from rural and peripheral parts of the country and that they have a clear anti-immigration and anti-Muslim stance. The Danish People’s Party also stands for Eurosceptic policies. Denmark Democrat voters fit the stereotype of the protest voter – rural, older, male, working-class with limited education. On the other hand, the composition of Danish People’s Party voters in 2026 reflected the population in general regarding age, gender and education. Here geographyand anti-immigrant sentiment were the main factors setting the party’s electorate apart.

Despite the fragmentation, Danish politics are not particularly polarized. The Red-Green Alliance and the Socialist People’s Party are much more moderate in their economic and pro–European Union policies than, say, La France Insoumise or even the Swedish Left Party.

The same could be said of the Danish People’s Party and its relation to other European parties of the radical right. True, the party has toyed with policies resembling those of the Reform UK Party regarding the EU and immigration, and its leader Morten Messerschmidt openly supported the election of Donald Trump in 2024 and appeared as a speaker at a demonstration organized by the extreme right-wing activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) in London in 2025. However, the party overall does not share the anti-system stance of the Rassemblement National or Alternative für Deutschland or even the Sweden Democrats.

When Lars Løkke Rasmussen formed the Moderates in 2021 after leaving his former party, the Liberals, one of his major aims was to block the influence of the left wing and the radical right on economic and employment policies. In 2022 he and Mette Frederiksen managed to convince the Liberals to break with the other parties of the right and form a coalition, something highly unusual in Danish politics. In 2026, on the other hand, Rasmussen and the Moderates have chosen to be an impediment to the formation of a working majority.

What is at stake

On its own terms, the outgoing three-party coalition was an unexpected success, given that the Social Democrats and the Liberals have been opponents since the early 20th century. It passed major reforms in labour-market and social policy, secondary and higher education, and climate and environmental policy. Except for the Danish People’s Party, all parties voiced clear support for the government’s pro-Ukraine policies.

The abolition of a public holiday as part of an economic reform act and easing of taxes on high-income earners, on the other hand, made a severe dent in the social profile of the Social Democrats. Working-class voters saw the party as centrist or even neoliberal, and Social Democratic attempts to address social inequalities in the election campaign failed to make an impression. The Social Democrats also began losing voters to the Danish People’s Party.

On the other side of the political divide, the Liberals underwent two splits between 2019 and 2022 and lost their leader, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, as a result of illness in 2023. In the 2026 election, under the competent but uninspiring leadership of Troels Lund Poulsen, they had to overcome the impression that, now more than ever, they acted in the interests of the agricultural sector and neglected urban voters. Like the Social Democrats, the Liberals failed to present a convincing agenda during the election campaign.

The parties to the left of the Social Democrats and to the right of the Liberals stepped in to fill the vacuum left by the major parties rather than offering their own agendas: the Red-Greens and the Socialist People’s Party by addressing social inequalities, the Liberal Alliance and the Conservatives by appealing to high-income urban voters, and the Denmark Democrats and the Danish People’s Party by upholding anti-immigrant sentiments and resistance to green-energy projects.

Despite the erratic and occasionally threatening behaviour toward Denmark of the United States under President Trump, foreign and security policy did not play a major role in the election campaign. Even if the centre-right has traditionally been more deferential to the United States than the Social Democrats, Mette Frederiksen has enjoyed support across the political spectrum for her rejection of U.S. demands to annex Greenland.

On the other hand, the hardline independence party, Naleraq, won one of the Greenlandic seats in the Folketing for the first time. In the face of competition from Naleraq for the independence vote, Siumut – the traditional governing party in Greenland – decided to leave the broad Naalakkersuisut (Greenlandic government) coalition which was formed after the 2025 elections in Greenland to fend off U.S. advances. This is an indication that the question of Greenland’s future role is still a matter of controversy which will influence Danish politics.

The general impression, however, was of an election campaign with no common theme other than questions over who should form the next government. At the end of the campaign, voters left and right were still unsure about the direction of the parties.

The need for new strategies

Whatever the outcome of the government formation process, Denmark is unlikely to change its foreign and security policies, and especially its policies on the EU and Ukraine, as these are subject to a near-general consensus. The new government is also unlikely to make major changes in economic policies as both sides will be committed to medium-term agreements. On the other hand, the leader of the Greenland Naalakkersuisut, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has publicly commented that the drawn-out government formation process in Denmark weakens his and Denmark’s ability to respond effectively to U.S. attempts to gain influence over or annex Greenland.

Perhaps the present impasse can best be described as the result of a conflict over whether and how the political wings to the left and right should be integrated in the active formation of coalitions and agreements.

In the first decade of this century, Liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen successfully integrated the Danish People’s Party into the governing majority as a supporting party. But the success turned to failure in the 2010s when Lars Løkke Rasmussen, then leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister from 2009 to 2011 and 2015 to 2019, faced major conflicts among the parties of the centre-right and radical right, almost paralyzing his governments.

Similarly, as a minister in Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s first government between 2011 and 2014, Mette Frederiksen witnessed the near-collapse of the Socialist People’s Party. As Prime Minister from 2019, she decided to base government formation on the left while she sought majorities for policy agreements in the centre and centre-right. The fragmentation of the parliamentary scene, however, means that the strategies which have worked since the turn of the century are no longer adequate for the late 2020s.