by RUNE MOLLER STAHL
Around Europe, old labor parties have alienated their base by forming grand coalitions with center-right forces. In Denmark, Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats have pursued this same strategy with the same dismal results.
Copenhagen saw a historic shift last Tuesday night, following the elections held in the Danish capital and across Denmark. After more than a century of holding power in Copenhagen, the Social Democrats finally lost the mayoralty.
Sisse Marie Welling, from the left-wing Socialist People’s Party (SF) instead claimed the lord mayor’s post within a broad coalition dominated by left-wingers. While the more moderate socialists in SF claimed the top job, the radical left Red-Green Alliance under leader Line Barfod emerged as the largest party with 22.1 percent of the vote. Together, the two socialist parties, supported by a smaller green party, almost secured an outright majority.
Following the election, these left-wing forces managed to create a coalition that did without virtually every other party in city hall. The Social Democrats were excluded even from a role in negotiations. This also saw the once-dominant party stripped of powerful board posts in important municipally led construction and public transport companies, historically central to the development of the city’s infrastructure.
The defeat came after an extremely negative — by Danish standards — campaign attacking the Red-Greens’ Barfod for her background in communist youth politics and denouncing the alliance’s Marxist foundations as a “corrosive, antidemocratic ideology.” Such accusations were remarkable coming from the Social Democrats, a party historically founded on Marxist principles.
This loss is both a substantial and symbolic shift. Copenhagen has been the center of the Danish labor movement since its rise in the 1870s. While other Scandinavian capitals like Oslo and Stockholm have moved rightward politically, Copenhagen has remained a historic bastion of left-wing politics.
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