After the longest coalition talks in Danish history, a new government led by the Social Democrats was sworn in last week—some 10 weeks after the March 24 parliamentary election. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s third term will include an explosion of military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
This right-wing programme will be enforced by the Social Democrats with the assistance of the ex-Stalinist Socialist People’s Party (SF, known as Green Left in English) and pseudo-left Unity List (referred to in English as the Red-Green Alliance, RGA).
The new government’s programme commits to spending the NATO target of 5 percent of GDP on war by 2030, consisting of 3.5 percent for the military and an additional 1.5 percent on military-related infrastructure. Corporation tax will fall by 3 percentage points during the government’s term, while the top rate of tax for those earning more than 2.6 million kroner (€350,000) per year will be eliminated. The government claims it intends to introduce a new tax for big shareholders to finance the tax cut, but details were not presented in the policy platform.
Another tax rate for earners making more than 641,000 kroner per year (€85,760) will be cut. The right-wing liberal thinktank Sepos calculated that a family with a director’s income would benefit almost twice as much as an average working-class family from the tax changes, with the director’s family paying 16,400 kroner less in tax each year, compared to 8,700 kroner for the worker’s family.
The Social Democrat-led coalition will also retain its “hardline” anti-refugee policies, which has seen Copenhagen work closely on the European level with fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to establish camps to hold asylum seekers outside Europe’s borders and accelerate deportations. The minister list revealed that the Social Democrat Morten Bødskov, the former defence minister, will be immigration and integration minister.
Frederiksen will head a minority government consisting of her Social Democrats, SF, the Social Liberals—who traditionally belong to the “red block” of parties led by the Social Democrats—and the Moderates, a split-off from the Liberals (Venstre), historically the dominant right-wing party. The four-party coalition controls 82 seats in the 179-seat Folketing, meaning that it will require support from the RGA or The Alternative, a small environmentalist party, to secure a majority.
The government has attempted to conceal its right-wing agenda with commitments on the environment, and by improving funding for education and halving sales tax for all groceries. SF and the Social Liberals have touted pledges to improve animal welfare, drinking water standards, and marine welfare. Sales tax will also be removed from fruit and vegetables in supermarkets.
That the decision was ultimately taken to integrate the ex-Stalinists and pseudo-left into government, or at least some form of support for it, speaks to the recognition within the ruling class that they require political cover to proceed with their agenda.
Frederiksen, who has held power since 2019, called the election over six months early in a bid to capitalise on a boost in popular support following her clash with US President Donald Trump over Greenland. Trump maintains that Washington must have possession of the autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, citing the island’s geostrategic importance in the Arctic and its vast natural resources. The Danish ruling class wants to retain formal control over Greenland because it makes Copenhagen an Arctic power and is the basis for territorial claims to waters rich in natural resources. To this end, Denmark is in talks with Trump on opening up a series of locations on the island to US military personnel.
Given the backing from successive Danish governments and the European imperialist powers more broadly for US imperialist wars of aggression over the past 35 years, Frederiksen’s invocation of “international law” and the “rules-based order” to defend Denmark’s control over its former colony was hypocritical. However, Copenhagen’s stance was given more credibility thanks to the support it received from the parties on the “left.” RGA leader Pelle Dragsted declared in January that since Trump’s threats put the nation at risk, it was necessary to back the government.
Notwithstanding the overwhelming opposition among workers in Denmark and across Europe to Trump’s fascist programme, the Social Democrats’ calculation backfired. The party emerged from the election as the largest in parliament but took just 21.9 percent of the vote, its worst result in over 120 years. Venstre and the Moderates, who had been in government with Frederiksen since 2022, also lost ground. As a result, Frederiksen has SF and the Red-Green Alliance, both of whom achieved modest gains at the polls, to thank for her third term in office.
A significant factor behind the growing support for SF and the RGA has been the sharp increase in the cost of living, which has accelerated following the US/Israeli war on Iran. “We want to provide targeted support to those Danes who have been hit hard by rising petrol and diesel prices,” Frederiksen said when presenting her government’s programme.
SF and the RGA have bent over backwards to ensure that policies promoted by the right-wing parties will be enforced. The RGA campaigned throughout the election on the basis that it would not support a government committed to corporate tax cuts and would demand a written agreement containing policy commitments in exchange for its parliamentary support.
Having violated both conditions, Dragsted cynically remarked at a press conference last Wednesday that since no formal written agreement existed with the government the RGA was not bound to vote in parliament to pass tax cuts that were at odds with its political views. Frederiksen, speaking separately, avoided stating openly whether, after being elected prime minister with the RGA’s votes, she would rely on support from the opposition right-wing parties for her government’s tax cuts. She did, however, express her “special thanks” to the RGA and Alternative for agreeing to back the government from the outside.
Venstre leader Troels Lund Poulsen made clear that the opposition would ensure Frederiksen her majority in policy areas supported by the right, writing on social media, “Venstre is of course ready to cooperate constructively in the areas where it [the government] wants to move Denmark in the right direction: rearmament and defence, investment in our schools and protecting the Realm.”
As for the promises in the government’s programme cited by the RGA to justify their support for it, many of them remain uncosted while others have timelines for implementation extending beyond the next election.
The support from SF and the RGA for Frederiksen’s government is a mark of their steady march to the right over recent years. SF, whose roots lay in a right-wing breakaway from the Communist Party following the Stalinist bureaucracy’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, has repeatedly helped secure majorities for Social Democrat-led governments since the 1960s. The party last sat in government from 2011 under Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, whose four-year government attacked social programmes following the global economic crisis and oversaw Denmark’s participation in the US-led war in Syria. SF has been one of the most vocal cheerleaders for NATO’s aggressive war against Russia in Ukraine and has backed every round of Danish rearmament since 2022.
One example of the absence of real differences between the two parties is SF’s nominee for environment minister in the new government, Maria Reumert Gjerding. She was a former RGA member and president of Denmark’s Nature Conservation Society.
The RGA, which portrayed itself as a more radical alternative to SF, has followed a similar course. It was formed by the remnants of the Stalinist Communist Party, the anti-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SAP), supporters of the Pabloite United Secretariat, and “new left” forces in 1989 for the purpose of winning parliamentary representation—hence its Danish name, Unity List. The RGA has a long record of backing Social Democrat governments. It endorsed Denmark’s dispatch of military forces to the Middle East in 2014 and helped Frederiksen secure a majority during her first term from 2019 to 2022.
In preparation for its latest support of a pro-war, class-war government, the RGA changed its party programme at its 2025 national meeting to explicitly support the “defence of the Danish realm,” ending any ambiguity about its approval of militarism. It has dropped the call for Denmark to immediately leave NATO, saying instead that Copenhagen should remain in the alliance until “alternative security structures” are built, i.e., an alliance led by the European imperialists, not the US.
The SAP has offered the most pernicious justification for supporting Frederiksen’s new government. According to a June 8 statement from its executive committee, SAP argued that the RGA had put “a nice fingerprint” on the new government’s programme, which contained promises in a “long, long list of spheres” from the environment to funding for schools, and strengthening the trade unions. Then, acknowledging that the economic core of the government’s agenda was pro-corporate and spending would focus on expanding the military, the statement asserted that the RGA retained the “freedom of opposition.” The statement continued:
We must use the enthusiasm generated by the many incentives in the government’s policy platform to rally support for the fight to make them a reality. Right now, the focus is on the fact that it is we on the left—not the DF or the DD [the far-right Danish People’s Party and Denmark Democrats]—who are actually trying to do something to help those who are struggling financially. That is why people will listen if we call for action on this issue.
It is precisely the far-right who will profit from the SAP and RGA’s cynical manoeuvres. Workers pushed into struggle by the government’s right-wing agenda will face the reality that it is only thanks to parties claiming to be on the “left” and even committed to “socialism” that this government is in power, making the far right’s posturing as the only real opponents of the “elites” more convincing. Moreover, the Pabloite claim that a Social Democrat-led government will respond to protests from below by making its empty promises “a reality” has been disproven time and again. Social Democratic parties around the world invariably respond to the upsurge of the class struggle from below by shifting further to the right and doubling down on their pro-capitalist politics.
The only way to defeat these forces is through the building of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class—a Danish section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The fight to unify the struggle of workers in Denmark with the working class throughout the European continent assumes renewed urgency under conditions in which the rising cost of living, explosion of rearmament and threat of war, and enrichment of the wealthy elite are unfolding in every country. Workers must respond by adopting the programme of the United Socialist States of Europe as the axis of their struggles.