NYTimes
November 14, 2007
Danish Prime Minister Narrowly Wins 3rd Term
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
COPENHAGEN, Nov. 13 — Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the center-right Danish prime minister who presided over a thriving economy and steered his country through a global uproar over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, narrowly won his third term in office on Tuesday.
Mr. Rasmussen’s coalition government, consisting of his Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, will probably have to include a new pro-immigration party, the New Alliance, which also espouses cuts to Denmark’s high income taxes. He will also need the support of the far-right Danish People’s Party to pass legislation.
Those alliances will make his task of forming a new government more complex in a country where support for tight border controls and the welfare state runs broad and deep.
With 99 percent of the vote counted, the governing bloc had won 89 of the 179 seats in Parliament, and the New Alliance Party had won five, The Associated Press reported. The opposition Social Democrats got 81 seats, The A.P. said.
To make this new constellation work, Mr. Rasmussen will have to weld together two very different allies. The Danish People’s Party, which supports the government but holds no ministerial positions, takes a hard line against immigration and Denmark’s generous welfare state.
The New Alliance, a party that is barely six months old and whose voters are mostly affluent urbanites, wants to ease restrictions on immigration and has proposed lowering the current top income tax rate of 63 percent to 40 percent.
Its handful of seats in Parliament, the Folketing, will give it a small but king-making role.
New Alliance is led by Naser Khader, a Syrian-born Danish citizen who became a prominent spokesman for greater tolerance in the Muslim world after widespread violence in response to a series of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten, a leading Danish newspaper.
Mr. Rasmussen called elections late last month, aiming to profit from a strong economy and the star power of “flexicurity,” the name given to the Danish model of a strong welfare state combined with easy hiring and firing. The jobless rate in Denmark is 3.1 percent, the lowest in over three decades, and the economy grew by 3.5 percent in 2006.
The prime minister has also had broad support for his tight immigration policies. When he took office in 2001, and again when he last won re-election in 2005, he pledged to keep a lid on immigration and asylum, and both have plunged during his terms.
The Social Democrats’ leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former member of the European Parliament, campaigned on a platform of support for the welfare state.
Perhaps surprisingly in the current international environment, Denmark’s military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan played marginal roles in the election campaign, which lasted less than a month.
Denmark removed its ground forces from Iraq last year, though a small air force contingent took their place. Likewise, all the major parties support the country’s presence in Afghanistan, where Danish troops fight alongside the British in the volatile southern provinces. Even the recent deaths of three Danish soldiers have not broken that consensus.
Instead, the campaign quickly fell under the shadow of the New Alliance’s impact on Denmark’s complex electoral mathematics, which are driven by the need to forge coalitions.
Though New Alliance first promoted its tax-cutting plans, it has since emphasized the need to relax immigration rules, perhaps one reason it lost ground in opinion polls conducted over the past two weeks.
Mr. Khader “looked like our savior for a while,” said Helle Wagner, 35, a business student in Copenhagen. “But his message was not clear.”
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