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Far-right Danish party to get new leader next month

Member of Parliament Lars Boje Mathiesen looks set to become leader of the far-right Nye Borgerlige (New Right) party in an uncontested leadership contest.

Published: 25 January 2023 17:14 CET
Far-right Danish party to get new leader next month
Lars Boje Mathiesen is set to become the new leader of the Nye Borgerlige party. Photo: Ida Marie Odgaard/Ritzau Scanpix

The deadline to register as a candidate in the party’s leadership contest expired on Tuesday prior to an extraordinary general meeting on February 7th.

The contest was triggered after party co-founder Pernille Vermund announced earlier in January her intention to step down as leader and eventually quit politics.

Mathiesen was the only member of the party to enter the leadership contest, Nye Borgerlige confirmed on Wednesday.

He is expected to officially replace Vermund as party leader at an extraordinary general meeting in the town of Fredericia next month.

A new deputy leader of the party must be elected at the same event after incumbent Peter Seier Christensen, like Vermund, decided to step down.

Christensen and Vermund co-founded the party, which runs on a libertarian and anti-immigration platform, in 2015.

In contrast to the leadership, there will be a contest to decide who will be the party’s new deputy leader.

Six candidates are running to replace Christensen. The only member of parliament to have put their name forward, Kim Edberg Andersen, has already withdrawn from the contest. Four of the remaining candidates are municipal councillors.

The leadership change reflects ongoing turbulence in the far-right party, which has seen its number of MPs drop from six to four since the general election in November after two of its lawmakers quit the party.

Mikkel Bjørn, the leader of parliament’s citizenship committee, this week defected from Nye Borgerlige to the national conservative Danish People’s Party, citing differences with Mathiesen.

READ ALSO: Leader of far-right Danish party to step down and quit politics

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POLITICS

Founder of far-right Danish People’s Party to retire from politics

Pia Kjærsgaard, the woman who built the far-right Danish People's Party into the kingmaker of Danish politics, transforming the country's immigration debate, has announced her retirement from parliament.

Published: 13 September 2024 17:01 CEST
Founder of far-right Danish People's Party to retire from politics

The 77-year-old, who stepped down from the leadership of her party in 2012 after 17 years at the helm, said in an interview on Friday that she would cease to be an MP when the current parliamentary term ends in 2026.

“You have to go when you are loved and respected. I feel very loved by my supporter base and by the party and also by a good part of the population,” I think it’s fair to say Kjærsgaard said in an interview on the TV2 channel. “So the time is now, after 40 years at [the parliament in] Christiansborg.” 

 
Kjærsgaard was elected as an MP for the now defunct Progress Party in 1984, leading the party for ten years between 1985 and 1995, when she left to found the Danish People’s Party. 
 
After the party became the third largest in parliament in the 2001 elections, Kjærsgaard forced the centre-right coalition led by Anders Fogh Rasmussen to push through a drastic tightening of immigration law, which her party boasted made Denmark “Europe’s strictest” country for immigration. 
 
Kjærsgaard has frequently generated controversy, accusing foreigners of “breeding like rabbits”, arguing that the 9/11 attacks did not represent a clash of civilisations as only one side was civilised, and accusing Muslim migrants of having “no desire whatsoever to take part in Danishness”, and of having “contempt for everything Western”. She has said that Islam “with fundamentalist tendencies” should be “fought to the highest degree”, condemning the religion as “medieval”. In 2020, she tried to blame minority communities for a city-wide outbreak of Covid-19 in Aarhus.

She was reported to the police in 2002 for referring to Muslims as people who “lie, cheat and deceive” in her party’s weekly newsletter, but was never prosecuted. 

The Danish People’s Party’s current leader, Morten Messerschmidt, had warm words for his party’s founder following her announcement. 

“Pia has not only been a colleague and a friend, but also an inspiration to me and many others,” he wrote on X. “Her unwavering commitment, fighting spirit and courage have characterised Danish politics for several decades.” 

Since Kjærsgaard stood down in 2012, support for the once powerful party has collapsed, with its share of the vote falling from 21 percent in the 2015 election to just 2.6 percent of the vote in the last national election in 2022.  

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