Mink row forces Danish PM Mette Frederiksen to call early general election

Denmark’s prime minister has called a general election just seven months before the end of her term in office.

The premiership of Mette Frederiksen, who has headed the Danish minority government since June 2019, has faced growing opposition ever since she took the decision to cull millions of healthy mink at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in order to protect humans from a mutation of the virus.

According to most recent polling, Frederiksen’s centre-left Social Democratic Party is level-pegging with the centre-right opposition, which includes parties that want to squeeze immigration laws.

The parliamentary election, scheduled for 1 November, will select members of the 179-seat Folketing.

Announcing the early ballot, Ms Frederiksen said: “We want a broad government with parties on both sides of the political middle.”

She admitted that “it is, of course, peculiar to have a general election in the middle of an international crisis.”

Ms Frederiksen has recently been speaking openly about governing with some of the parties that are part of the centre-right opposition.

She became Denmark‘s youngest prime minister when she took office aged 41 in 2019.

She reached out to other political parties, including the opposition, to help steer the Scandinavian country through the Covid-19 pandemic and later teamed up with the opposition to hike Danish defence spending in the wake of the March 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

She also is a staunch supporter of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In June, a Danish parliament-appointed commission harshly criticised Ms Frederiksen’s government for its decision to wipe out the 15 million captive mink population, and said it lacked legal justification for going ahead with the cull.

The decision devastated Denmark’s mink industry. Previously the country was one of the world’s biggest exporters of furs.

After the report was published, one of the government’s centre-left allies, the Social Liberal Party, stood up against Ms Frederiksen and criticised her for her handling of the issue.

Ms Frederiksen has insisted that she didn’t know the culling decision was unlawful, saying it was “based on a very serious risk assessment.” A law was passed shortly after to make it legal.

With additional reporting from the Associated Press