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Danish General Election still too close to predict

Alex Pedersen
June 18th, 2015


This article is more than 9 years old.

The latest polls show that this election might make history and will definitely be closer than usual

A sizeable minority won’t decide until they enter the voting box today (photo: Leif Jørgensen)

The Danish General Election today will be close – much closer than usual, the latest polls predict.

With 89 mandates predicted for the blue bloc and 86 for the present government and its support parties, Venstre leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen can look forward to getting the keys to the PM’s office back soon.

Just two mandates
However, it will only take two mandates switching from blue to red for PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt to stay in office for another four years. The poll prediction was carried out by Megafon for TV2 and Politiken last night.

As it looks right now, the election is set to be as close as it was in 1998, when one single mandate and 176 votes from the Faroe Islands secured Poul Nyrup Rasmussen the election, and it is suspected that the four mandates held by Greenland and the Faroes could once again come into play.

“The writers on TV shows couldn’t have come up with anything better than this,” the editor-in-chief at Fyns Amts newspaper, Troels Myhlenberg, told TV2 Politics.

“It looks like it’ll be close to the very last, and still there is something in me that tells me when it looks like it’ll be this close, it perhaps won’t. We will probably be surprised,” Myhlenberg continued.

The Alternativet election
According to the Megafon poll, 51.4 percent of the voters are going to vote for a red bloc party, and 48.4 percent for one in the red.

There has been little change in the last week, although it’s believed that Enhedlisten has lost a mandate to Alternativet, which now looks like it will storm into parliament with at least nine.

“I think this election will go down in history as ‘the Alternativet election’,” Myhlenberg told TV2 Politics.

“They will become just as big as SF and Radikale, and they could ultimately have the deciding vote. Which is crazy when you think about it, as just a month ago, people were ridiculing them.”

PM will get first option
According to the Megafon poll, the PM’s party Socialdemokraterne will once again be the biggest in Denmark, with 25.1 percent of the votes, ahead of Venstre on 20.4 percent, which will therefore give Thorning-Schmidt first option on forming a government.

But as things currently stand, the polls predict she will be unable to find the necessary mandates.


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A survey carried out by Megafon for TV2 has found that 71 percent of parents have handed over children to daycare in spite of them being sick.

Moreover, 21 percent of those surveyed admitted to medicating their kids with paracetamol, such as Panodil, before sending them to school.

The FOLA parents’ organisation is shocked by the findings.

“I think it is absolutely crazy. It simply cannot be that a child goes to school sick and plays with lots of other children. Then we are faced with the fact that they will infect the whole institution,” said FOLA chair Signe Nielsen.

Pill pushers
At the Børnehuset daycare institution in Silkeborg a meeting was called where parents were implored not to bring their sick children to school.

At Børnehuset there are fears that parents prefer to pack their kids off with a pill without informing teachers.

“We occasionally have children who that they have had a pill for breakfast,” said headteacher Susanne Bødker. “You might think that it is a Panodil more than a vitamin pill, if it is a child who has just been sick, for example.”

Parents sick and tired
Parents, when confronted, often cite pressure at work as a reason for not being able to stay at home with their children.

Many declare that they simply cannot take another day off, as they are afraid of being fired.

Allan Randrup Thomsen, a professor of virology at KU, has heavily criticised the parents’ actions, describing the current situation as a “vicious circle”.

“It promotes the spread of viruses, and it adds momentum to a cycle where parents are pressured by high levels of sick-leave. If they then choose to send the children to daycare while they are still recovering, they keep the epidemic going in daycares, and this in turn puts a greater burden on the parents.”