PM bruised after standing up to Trump over Greenland

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen suffered an electoral setback after her left-leaning bloc failed to garner enough votes to form a government, following a campaign marred by US President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland.

Frederiksen’s Social Democrats received the most votes and won 38 seats in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament. results That’s up from 50 seats four years ago, the report released early Wednesday showed. IT reportedly This marks the party’s worst election result since 1903.

The left-leaning group, or “red bloc”, won 84 seats, six short of the 90 seats required for a majority, while the right-leaning group, or “blue bloc”, won 77 seats.

Denmark’s Frederiksen told supporters in Copenhagen that it would be “difficult” to form a government and sought to downplay the decline in his party’s popularity following various external shocks.

“We’ve had to deal with war, we’ve been threatened by the American president and we’ve had a 4 percentage point decline in almost seven years, I think that’s OK,” Frederiksen said, according to Reuters.

The election results pave the way for difficult coalition talks in the coming weeks; Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen’s center-right Moderates, who won 14 seats, are playing a decisive role.

“We stand in the middle. Don’t run towards the corner flags. We stand in the middle. That’s where the game gets interesting. Come and play with us,” Rasmussen said, according to a CNBC translation.

The prime minister had called for a snap vote months earlier than expected in a bid to capitalize on popular support and secure a third consecutive term after defying Trump’s push to seize control of the self-governing Danish territory.

Political parties in the Scandinavian country focused largely on domestic issues during the election campaign, including the state of the economy, clean drinking water, food and fuel prices.

In contrast, Greenland’s future was less clear, with a broad consensus existing as to its place in the kingdom.

Lykke Friis, director of Think Tank Europa in Denmark, said the fate of Greenland and Copenhagen’s stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “played no role” in the election results.

“The main issues were drinking water and also animal welfare, and these are issues that are not very good for the Social Democratic party,” Friis told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Wednesday. he said.

“I think it’s also important to note that, as injured as Mette Frederiksen is at the moment, winning three elections in a row is actually pretty impressive. That rarely happens in European politics,” he added.

Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen described He said the vote was the most important in the island’s history and said the region was still in a “serious situation”.

Speaking to AFP on Monday, Nielsen said: “We are in a period where there is a superpower trying to take over, take over, control us.”

Greenland was dragged into the center of a geopolitical firestorm at the beginning of the year, when the US president, who has long defended control of Greenland, renewed his interest in the region.

Trump said at the time that the island was vital to US national security and frequently expressed concerns about Russia and China’s Arctic influence.

The issue has increased trans-Atlantic tensions and shaken the NATO military alliance, with Denmark’s Frederiksen warning that the world order as we know it is over.

Trump finally defused tensions over his desire to make Greenland part of the United States, telling the World Economic Forum in late January that he had reached a “future agreement framework” that would meet U.S. interests in the long term.