Cordsen: They were the weakest in focus in Mette Frederiksens speech.
DR-Politics in Politics
Tuesday, October 01, 2024 • 12:10 PM UTC - in Politics
Christiansborg has caused a popcorn effect.
The last two years before an election, the political tension curve always rises, and with the SVM government, the tension is particularly high.
The cooperation between the governments is described by the prime minister herself as "remarkable," and all three governing parties are struggling with poor opinion polls. It is the stuff that political conflicts are made of, especially when an election is approaching.
Also remember that there is only one year left until the municipal election, which is significant for both the two major municipal parties, S and V, and for the Moderates, who are aiming for their communal breakthrough.
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S and V in political fortressing
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The government summit itself has declared that the three governing parties will become more divergent in the public sphere from now on. Voters can notice that the parties are different, and not just discover the compromises made behind closed doors.
There should also be room for solo statements like Mette Frederiksen's announced break with the agreement on how the pension age will increase in the future.
At the same time, Social Democrats and the Liberals have started a political fortressing process for the period after the next election.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has clear signals that she is still the same red Mette from the S-government before 2022 and her retreat from her own statements about, for example, Danes' work ethic.
Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen has made somewhat veiled remarks about hoping for a blue government. He can certainly see that such a project looks somewhat unrealistic with the current opinion polls and blue statements about who will not cooperate with whom.
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An extra poisonous factor
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Neither of them are on their way to giving up SVM or returning to red and blue blocs. They both need to keep all options open, especially since voters in no way seem to want another round of SVM.
The same need also applies to Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. The Moderates were born with the dream of a broad center-right government, and Løkke is currently most focused on getting a handle on the internal issues in the party.
Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the Moderates stand in the latest opinion poll at only four percent of the votes. (Photo: © Ida Marie Odgaard, Ritzau Scanpix)
But when it has succeeded, Løkke will likely have a great need for political marking to win back the lost voters. It is extra poisonous that it looks like it is the Left that is currently gathering M-voters.
The government summit has the ambition that the sharpened profiling can take place without the three parties ending up in destructive and exhausting conflicts. The labor market partnership, which the three party leaders are still quite satisfied with, can continue unimpeded.
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An innocuous opening statement
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The hope from the opposition, of course, is the opposite. That the conflict level in the SVM government will become both destructive and exhausting as the elections approach.
Opposition parties plan to do what they can to fuel the internal disagreements in the government. For example, they plan to make pension the main theme in the opening debate on Thursday.
And they have already begun to speculate about when the parliamentary election might come.
In the light of this, the opening statement was innocuous.
The conditions for the most affected are not a theme with significant ideological conflicts between the three governing parties. At the same time, social policy is well-suited to reminding voters of Mette Frederiksen as a genuine social democrat.
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Hope for much more ballad
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Therefore, the topic was well-chosen for the opening statement – also if there are probably still several months until the government comes with its presentation on the so-called dignity reform.
Closer at hand is education. The government's presentation on reforms of youth education is expected next week, and here there is a common front and no internal ideological battles in SVM. Not even when there is agreement on freeing after-school care.
However, the government is betting that the education presentation will give a lot of external ballad. Both with other parties and outside of Christiansborg.
The experience from the first two years with the broad majority government is also that without friction, there is no one who discovers the government's political results.
And the government dreams that voters will soon see something other than the abolition of large prayer days.
Warning: This article was translated by a Large Language Model, in case of doubt, you can always visit the original source.