Jacob Christensen

Just some short points about issues on top of the political agenda in Denmark:

1. The question about how the local government reform which will take force in 2007 and the tax stop policy which has been in place since the government took office in 2001 will affect local services has been the focus of attention in a fight between local governments and the government. Ministers, including Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, have dismissed protests as organised by “the usual troublemakers” and based on false calculations of public finances. Another interesting point is that the Liberal Party has felt the need to dig up Anker Jørgensen as a bogey to potentially disgruntled voters. (Press release from Interior Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen)
2. The Danish People’s Party has been engaged in an internal conflict about the party leadership’s very tight control over the party organisation. This week 9 local officals were excluded – not over an open disagreement on specific polices, but over individual members’ and local organisation’s ability to voice other standpoints than those of the national leadership. (News reports from Danmarks Radio – interviews with members and local officials, interview with Pia Kjærsgaard)
3. According to an opinion poll published in Politiken, the support for the opposition is now bigger than the support for the government and the Danish People’s Party. The poll also gives the Social Democrats a rare relative lead over the Liberal Party.

It’s the same story every time: Denmark starts the qualification for a major Soccer championship with a string of uninspired games, either losing to or drawing with minor nations. In the end that costs us the place in the final rounds.

This time the mighty Danes managed to get a draw against Northern Ireland.

The only comfort the Danes can take from Saturday’s qualifying matches will be that Sweden beat our traditional nemesis Spain 2-0 in Stockholm.

The number of portfolios allocated to each party in the new government has been the object of some interest in Swedish media. Just for the fun of it, I did some calculations of the logic behind the distribution.

A rule of thumb says that each party should get a share of the portfolios that is roughly equivalent to that party’s share of the votes in the coalition.

With 22 portfolios to distribute, we get the following result:

• Conservatives: 26,23% of the total vote = 54,37% of the coalition vote = 11,96 ministers
• Centre Party: 7,88% total = 16,33% coalition = 3,59 ministers
• Liberal Party: 7,54% total = 15,63% coalition = 3,44 ministers
• Christian Democrats: 6,59% total = 13,66% coalition = 3,01 ministers

As cutting up actual ministers in order to make them fit a strictly mathematical distribution would be highly unethical, we need to find another key to use when we distribute the remainders. Using the principle of the largest remainder, we get: Conservatives – 12 ministers, Centre Party – 4 ministers, Liberal Party – 3 ministers and Christian Democrats – 3 ministers.

What actually happened was that the Conservatives renounced on their “last” minister which was then transferred to the Liberals who were next in line. This is not surprising – junior partners are often overrepresented in coalitions – but what would be interesting to know is whether the Liberals’ bonus portfolio was Integration or Europe.

If you are curious about what a distribution with 20 ministers would have looked like, the answer is: Conservatives – 10,87 (i.e. 11), Centre Party – 3,27 (3), Liberals – 3,13 (3) and Christian Democrats – 2,73 (3). If the Conservatives renounced on their last minister, the Centre Party would have had 4 portfolios.