COPENHAGEN: Voters in Denmark will decide who runs the Scandinavian country for the next four years in a general election next week, a vote that follows a standoff with US President Donald Trump over the future of the kingdom's semiautonomous territory of Greenland.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the election last month, apparently hoping that her straight-talking image in the Greenland crisis would win her points with the electorate. If the leader of the center-left Social Democratic party can put together a new government after Tuesday's vote, she will embark on her third term.
Here is what to know about the vote.
Frederiksen hopes for a third term
The 48-year-old prime minister has led the European Union and NATO member country since mid-2019. She is known for strong support of Ukraine in its defense against Russia's invasion and for a restrictive approach to migration.
In her second term, her support waned as the cost of living rose. But she enjoyed a bump in popularity as the government navigated the crisis over Trump's designs on Greenland, which culminated in January in a short-lived threat to impose tariffs on European nations that opposed his call for U.S. control of the vast Arctic island.
University of Copenhagen election researcher Kasper Møller Hansen predicts that Frederiksen will likely cling to power, though perhaps with the worst results yet for her party, which looks likely to finish short of the 27.5% of the vote it won in 2022, though still in first place.
"She's getting a big burst to her poll results on the topic of Greenland, or the relationship with the United States, or Ukraine," said Møller Hansen. "On home turf, she's being really challenged."
Denmark's system of proportional representation typically produces coalition governments, traditionally made up of several parties from either left or right. The outgoing administration was the first in decades to straddle the political divide.
Challengers from the right
Frederiksen has two center-right challengers, one inside her current government and one outside it.
Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen leads the Liberal, or Venstre, party. It headed several recent administrations but has polled weakly in recent years.
The Liberal Alliance of 34-year-old Alex Vanopslagh is a rival from the so-called "blue bloc" of parties on the right, calling for lower taxes and less bureaucracy, and for Denmark to abandon its refusal to use nuclear power. But a recent admission from Vanopslagh to taking cocaine earlier in his time as party leader may have dented his chances.
Further to the right, the anti-immigration Danish People's Party looks well-placed to bounce back from a very weak showing in 2022. If neither left-wing or right-wing blocs win a working majority, the centrist Moderate party of Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen could end up as the kingmaker.
Immigration still a hot issue
Denmark has long been known for some of Europe's toughest immigration policies, and Frederiksen has been instrumental in that.
Seeking to counter pressure from the right and pointing to a possible surge in migration because of the Iran war, she announced proposals this month that include a potential "emergency brake" on asylum and tighter controls on criminals who lack legal residence. Her government had already unveiled a plan to allow the deportation of foreigners who have been sentenced to at least one year in prison for serious crimes.
Frederiksen is one of the European leaders pushing to set up so-called "return hubs" outside the EU for rejected asylum seekers.
Denmark received 1,961 asylum applications last year, a fraction of the more than 21,000 it saw in 2015.
Where pigs come into it
The cost of living, pensions and a potential wealth tax have been among the hot topics in the campaign — as have pigs.
Denmark is one of the world's biggest pork exporters. The left-wing Alternative party is calling for greater animal welfare, a whistleblower program in agriculture, and a reduction of animal production to levels required just to feed Denmark's population of about 6 million population. That would mean an 86% drop in the number of pigs.
And then there's Greenland
The territory hasn't been a significant issue in the campaign because there's broad agreement on its place in the kingdom.
"There's a huge consensus on our relationship to Greenland and our relationship to foreign powers," Møller Hansen said.
Frederiksen warned in January that an American takeover of Greenland would amount to the end of NATO. But the crisis has simmered down, at least for now. After Trump backed down on his tariff threats, the U.S., Denmark and Greenland started technical talks on an Arctic security deal.
In Greenland itself, the election will be a test for the territory's prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who has been in office for about a year.
The election campaign has shown cracks in his broad-based government. A dispute over local ministers campaigning for seats in Copenhagen led to one party withdrawing from his coalition, forcing Greenlandic Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt out of her post. She later quit her party, Siumut.
What Danes are voting for
Voters are electing the Folketing, Denmark's single-chamber parliament.
It has 179 seats, 175 of them for lawmakers from Denmark itself and two each for representatives from thinly populated Greenland and the kingdom's other semiautonomous territory, the Faroe Islands.
More than 4.3 million people are eligible to have their say next week. Turnout is typically high, and was 84.2% in the last election in 2022.