Denmark election: A month on, why has a new government still not been formed?
Voters in Denmark went to the polls a month ago, on 1 November.
As the results came in it was clear incumbent Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had pulled off something of a surprise result: not only were her Social Democrats the biggest single party but, thanks to MPs in Greenland, a left-leaning bloc of parties controlled a majority of seats in the Danish parliament.
From the outside, it seemed forming a new government would be straightforward.
But that's not proven to be the case.
With a very slim majority of just one, the left-bloc parties realised they would have to agree on every single position, all of the time, with no room for any rogue MPs going off-script and voting against the government line.
So fairly early in the process, two parties dropped out: Red-Greens and The Alternative.
"The whole project around having a left-of-centre government with Social Democrats leading, that is out now and the main reason for that is the fragility of such a set-up," explained Ditte Brasso Sørensen, a senior fellow at Think Tank Europa in Copenhagen.
As political luck would have it, Mette Frederiksen campaigned on a promise that she would reach out across the aisle and try to form a government with parties from the right side of the spectrum.
"On election night when it dawned on everyone quite late that left-wing parties would have a majority, a lot of commentators wondered if Frederiksen would go back on her promise of forming a left-leaning government. But now she has the upper hand and she can hold firm in the negotiations, saying 'this is what I promised during the campaign'," said Brasso Sørensen.
Denmark hasn't had a red-blue government that spans the political aisle since the 1970s, and that means negotiations on how to
Read more on euronews.com
