The Danish People's Party is a nationalist and right-wing populist political party in Denmark. It was formed in 1995 by former members of the Progress Party (FrP).
The Folketing, also known as the Parliament of Denmark or the Danish Parliament in English, is the unicameral national legislature (parliament) of the Kingdom of Denmark—Denmark proper together with the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Established in 1849, until 1953 the Folketing was the lower house of a bicameral parliament, called the Rigsdag; the upper house was the Landsting. It meets in Christiansborg Palace, on the islet of Slotsholmen in central Copenhagen.
General elections were held in Denmark on 15 September 2011 to elect the 179 members of the Folketing. Of those 179, 175 members were elected in Denmark, two in the Faroe Islands and two in Greenland.
Morten Messerschmidt is a Danish politician and since 2022 leader of the Danish People's Party. He was an elected Member of the Folketing at the 2019 Danish general election having previously served from 2005 to 2009. At the 2014 European Parliament election, he was elected a Member of the European Parliament for Denmark with 465,758; the highest number of personal votes ever cast at a Danish election.
Mette Frederiksen is a Danish politician who has been serving as prime minister of Denmark since June 2019, and leader of the Social Democrats since June 2015. The second woman to hold either office, she is also the youngest prime minister in Danish history, the first to be born after Margrethe II's accession to the throne, and the first to serve under Frederik X.
The Alternative is a green and pro-European political party in Denmark. The party was publicly launched on 27 November 2013 by former Minister of Culture Uffe Elbæk and Josephine Fock; Elbæk had been a parliamentarian for the Social Liberal Party. Elbæk was the leader of the party until February 2020, where he stepped down and was succeeded by Fock. Currently the party is led by Franciska Rosenkilde. It collaborates with DiEM25 at the European level. The Alternative regards itself as a political movement and a cultural voice, as well as a political party.
Karen Melchior is a Danish lawyer and politician, formerly of the Social Liberal Party, who has served as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019–2024.
General elections were held in the Kingdom of Denmark on 1 November 2022, except in the Faroe Islands, where they were held on 31 October as 1 November was a national day of mourning for victims at sea. Of the 179 members of the Folketing, 175 were elected in Denmark proper, two in the Faroes and two in Greenland. The elections were called on 5 October following an ultimatum to the government by the Social Liberals due to the outcome of a report on the 2020 Danish mink cull by the Mink Commission, which was critical of the government. Voter turnout was 84% in Denmark, 48% in Greenland, and 71% in the Faroes, with a combined turnout of 84% for the realm as a whole.
Rasmus Paludan is a Danish-Swedish politican and lawyer, who is the founder and leader of the far-right nationalist Danish political party Stram Kurs. Paludan has become known for his extremist views, including that Islam should be banned and that immigrants of non-Western background should be deported from Denmark. He is considered by political scientists and media to be far-right and a right-wing extremist.
Stram Kurs, is a far-right, nationalist, anti-islam political party in Denmark and Sweden founded in 2017 by Danish-Swedish lawyer Rasmus Paludan. The party is almost exclusively associated with its founder and his anti-Islam activism and demonstrations.
Ann Pernille Vermund Bretton-Meyer is a Danish architect (MAA) and politician, being a member of the Folketing since 2019. She is known for co-founding and being the leader of the national-conservative political party Nye Borgerlige from its founding in 2015 until February 2023 and again from October 2023 to January 2024. On 10 January 2024, she surprisingly announced that she had left Nye Borgerlige, recommending its dissolution. A week later, she joined the parliamentary group of the Liberal Alliance.
Magnus Johannes Heunicke is a Danish journalist and politician who serves as a member of the Folketing for the Social Democrats political party. He was the Minister of Health from 2019 to 2022, and minister of elderly affairs from 2019 to 2021.
On 31 December 2019, China announced the discovery of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The first Danish case was reported on 27 February, and prime minister Mette Frederiksen announced lockdown measures on 11 March effective from 13 March. Following a period of consistent increases in hospitalisations, the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 fell from March onwards, with the number of cases in need of intensive care and ventilator units, also peaking in late March. Starting on 15 April, a very slow and gradual reopening was initiated.
Cluster 5 is a designation used by the Danish Statens Serum Institut for a virus variant described by the institute in autumn 2020, in connection with investigations of SARS-CoV-2 infection among mink and humans in the north of Jutland, Denmark.
Lars Boje Mathiesenda is a Danish politician who has been an independent member of the Danish Parliament, the Folketing, since March 2023. Previously a member of the Nye Borgerlige political party before his expulsion in 2023, he was first elected to the Folketing at the 2019 general election for the Nye Borgerlige and again at the 2022 general election.
The Moderates is a liberal political party in Denmark founded by former Prime Minister and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He announced the name in a foundational speech on 5 June 2021. At the same time, he said that his main scenario was that the party would be formed after the 2021 Danish local elections. The name was, according to Rasmussen, inspired by the fictitious Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg's party Moderaterne in the hit political TV drama Borgen as well as the Swedish Moderate Party, the then–second largest party in the Swedish Riksdag. The Moderates' political position is referred to as centre to centre-right.
The Mink Commission formally the Commission of Inquiry into the Case of the Culling of Mink is a Danish investigative commission set up by a majority in the Folketing in 2020 to investigate The Mink Case ; the culling of all minks in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic. It began its work on 23 April 2021. The commission consists of national judge Michael Kistrup, who is chairman, as well as law professor Helle Krunke from the University of Copenhagen and lawyer Ole Spiermann from the firm Bruun & Hjejle.
Events in the year 2022 in Denmark.
The 2020 Danish mink cull was the government-mandated slaughter of all roughly 17 million mink that were being raised on farms for their fur in Denmark. The cull started in September in response to the detection of Cluster 5, an outbreak of a novel variant of SARS-CoV-2, in the mink during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark. The cluster led to concerns that the potential of spillover to humans could reduce the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. The cull was made nation-wide on 4 November 2020; however, two days later the government announced that the extension of the cull orders had been given without legal authority, causing a political scandal, also known as the "Mink Case". Around 150,000 mink were culled without authority before the problem was identified.
Agerskovgruppen is an activist association of farmers in Denmark. It was formed in January 2011 by two Southern Jutland farmers, Jens Peter Aggesen and Thorkild Fink, who were dissatisfied with the regulation of agriculture resulting from water area plans and with Lars Løkke Rasmussen I Government's Green Growth Plan. The association takes its name from the village of Agerskov in Southern Jutland, and the historic Agerskov Inn is the association's base, where it holds some of its meetings.
