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2024 EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

What’s at stake for Denmark’s political parties in the coming EU elections?

With the Moderate Party at risk of losing its only seat and the Liberal Party facing seeing its number of MEPs halved, Denmark's junior government parties have a lot at stake in the coming EU elections.

Published: 7 May 2024 13:09 CEST
What's at stake for Denmark's political parties in the coming EU elections?
Activist for Denmark's Liberal Party (Venstre) celebrate after the party's success in the 2019 EU elections. This year the party risks losing two, or even three, of it's seats. Photo: Claus Bech/Ritzau Scanpix

Campaigning in Denmark ahead of the EU elections on June 9th has yet to really get going, but the most recent polls suggest that the Moderates and Liberals, the two right of centre parties in the country’s three party grand coalition, have the most to lose.   

A poll last week, carried out by Epinion for Denmark’s state broadcaster DR, brought bad news for the Moderate Party led by former prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, with support for the party falling to 4.5 percent from the 7.4 percent the party had in a previous poll from March. This has brought it below the threshold of about 6.5 percent to get a seat in the parliament. 

When the party was founded in 2022, it quickly gained an MEP, after Bergur Løkke Rasmussen, Rasmussen’s son, crossed over from the Liberals. 

But being part of Denmark’s less than popular three-party coalition, together with a series of missteps by the party’s lead European candidate, Stine Bosse, seems to have weighed the upstart party down. Now it’s not only the younger Rasmussen, who is second on the party list, who risks losing his seat, but Bosse as well. 

The Moderates are not the only party to be struggling as a result of taking part in the government, however. 

The Liberals risk seeing the number of MEPs they have in Brussels halved from the four they won in 2019, and if they perform badly when the campaign starts for real, they risk being reduced to a single seat.  

This is the party that came out top in the 2019 European elections, in one of the last triumphs for its then leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen, overtaking the Social Democrats to become the biggest Danish party in Brussels. 

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It now looks like the Social Democrats, the only government party which can look relatively optimistically towards June, will take back that position. 

While support for Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen's party is plummeting in national election polling, falling to just 19.2 in the most recent Epinion poll, down 30 percent from the 2022 election result, it is doing better in Europe.

According to last week's Epinion poll, the Social Democrats stand to get 20.1 percent of the vote in June, only a slight decline from the 21.5 the party won in the 2019 European elections.  

With Denmark gaining an extra seat in the European Parliament following the UK's exit, this means the party is set to get four MEPs, up from three in the 2019 election. 

It's not only government parties that have reasons to worry. 

The Social Liberal party (Radikale Venstre), promotes itself as Denmark's most pro-EU party, and its former leader, Margrethe Vestager, has risen to become one of the most powerful figures in Brussels. 

But the party is currently set to win just 7 percent of the vote, down from 10 percent in the 2019 European elections, meaning it is likely to lose one of its two MEPs, and is not too far off losing both. 

The Conservative Party, still reeling from the death of its leader, Søren Pape, from a cerebral haemorrhage in March, is also facing a difficult election.

The Conservatives are the only Danish party in the powerful EPP block in Brussels, giving it a seat at the table with the powerful German Christian Democrats,  France's Republican Party, and Spain's Partido Popular.

They have won one seat or more in every European election since Denmark joined in 1979. While last week's Epinion poll also gave it 7 percent of the vote, it also doesn't have far to fall to lose its only seat.  

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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

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