00:00Well, for more on what's coming out of the Danish elections, we can bring in Ulrich Pram-Gadd,
00:05senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
00:09Thank you so much for talking to us here on France 24 today.
00:12Now, Fredriksson has led Denmark since 2019.
00:16She is, if narrowly, projected to secure another term.
00:20Her grand coalition, though, is expected not to win a parliamentary majority.
00:25What impact is that likely to have on her plans?
00:30I think we will get closer to something like, you know, the Dutch and Belgian situation,
00:35where it takes some time to form a government and we'll have to patch it together with a lot of
00:40parties.
00:42So at the moment, we're waiting for the results from the elections.
00:46But the real result will only appear in maybe days, maybe weeks,
00:52before a number of parties will have to agree on how to proceed.
00:56Now, Fredriksson called this moat months before the October deadline.
01:01What was the thinking there for people not so familiar, possibly, with the Danish election process?
01:07And do you think it's likely to pay off?
01:11You know, the Social Democrats, like Social Democrats and other broad traditional people's parties in Europe,
01:20have been eroding in terms of electoral support for decades.
01:24But actually, the erosion of the support for the Danish Social Democrats has been slower than other places.
01:33And therefore, I think the Trump debacle and the Greenland crisis gave her, as your correspondent mentioned,
01:43a bump in the approval ratings.
01:46And she thought, maybe I can use that momentum going into the elections to stop the erosion of the support.
01:54That didn't happen. But the fragmentation of the political landscape around her still makes her the most likely person to
02:04lead the government going forward.
02:06Now, a correspondent just then suggested that the Trump question regarding Greenland wasn't such a decisive factor at the end
02:14of the day.
02:15Would you agree with that assessment?
02:19On the one hand, she very much tried to play on that.
02:25The trouble is that she's been forming this broad center government with a minister of foreign affairs and a minister
02:35for defense,
02:36who also played important roles in the battle with Trump in relation to the rearmament of Denmark,
02:44in relation to European integration, in relation to Ukraine.
02:49So we have the three characters, the three leading characters of the three parties that, in the Danish public's eyes,
02:58have been steering through this troubled water.
03:04They were all vying for the position as prime minister.
03:10At the same time, the domestic politics that these three parties have been conducting have not been very popular.
03:19So there's been this erosion of the center parties and more support for the left wing and for the right
03:26wing.
03:28I'd like to talk a little bit about a major election issue that we've been hearing about time and time
03:33again, the cost of living crisis.
03:35Frederiksen, of course, presiding over rising prices, a lot of discontent among Danish people.
03:42Just how much has that particular issue affected the outcome for the prime minister today?
03:52I think it made a difference, particularly for some of the very right wing parties that actually have been campaigning
04:01on that issue from way back from the corona inflation.
04:05It kind of waned in the public attention.
04:11But then came Trump's war on Iran.
04:15So the hiking gas prices the last couple of weeks actually, in that sense, helped some of the most critical
04:24parties towards the center government.
04:27So it made a difference in the end, I'm sure.
04:30I'm reading here that if the results announced by the exit polls are confirmed, the centrist moderate party is likely
04:37to become the kingmaker with 14 seats.
04:39How do you think the moderate party might sway the the final aspect of the coalition government that comes out
04:47of this election?
04:50Actually, it's we have two different major TV channels in Denmark.
04:55They have a different exit polls, so they don't agree exactly on the role of the moderates.
05:02And on top of that, there is a number of the centrist parties that might conceivably be moved around.
05:09Plus, we're still waiting for any kind of indications of what members of parliament would come from Greenland and from
05:17the Faroe Islands.
05:18They each sent two members to parliament.
05:22So there's a lot of members of parliament in the middle that can combine in different ways.
05:28So it's really, really interesting to see whether it will be possible to patch together a left-wing government or
05:36it will be easier to patch together some kind of center government.
05:39But there's really nobody who can know that at this point in time.
05:45Ulrik Pramgaard, I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there.
05:47Ulrik Pramgaard, CD researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
05:51Thank you very much.
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