Jacob Christensen

My immediate reaction: This could only happen in Jutland.

Man dies after being hit by ten cars.

For some reason, Denmark has been hit – if you excuse the pun – by a series of hit-and-run accidents recently, but this surely must be one of the most awful accidents on Danish roads.

Cars are dangerous, trains unreliable, long-distance buses unavailable, cycling not recommended during the winter – and in any event many roads do not have bicycle-lanes.

Hmm. Getting around in Denmark in a safe manner is difficult.

In Danish, you can ask someone – usually a politician or a high-ranking civil servant – to “shut up retroactively” (“holde k�ft med tilbagevirkende kraft”). For some reason, I can’t recall ever reading or hearing a similar expression in Swedish or English, so maybe this tells us something about the Danes.

In any event, the former political spokesman of the Liberal Party (and winner of the celebrity “Stagelight” competition on DR TV 2005) and present manager of TV2 Radio, Jens Rohde, in an interview with the tabloid BT managed to comment the Social Democratic leader, Helle Torning-Schmidt, in a rather patronizing way and has now been told by the General Manager of TV2, Per Mikael Jensen, to shut op – preferably retroactively.

It should be noted that Rohde’s appointment was met with raised eyebrows among the opposition and political commentators: Choosing an active politician for a high-profile media job in a state-owned corporation appeared to fit in a line of appointments of managers with Liberal or Conservative credentials – not that the Social Democrats were ever strangers to politically motivated appointments in the media sector.

Just as background: What Rohde said about Ms. Thorning-Schmidt was, that he didn’t see her as a credible candidate for the Prime Minister’s office and that the media would have torn her apart, had she been a man.

A little excitement in today’s Danish Gallup poll: Compared with the 2005 elections, support for the Liberals (26,3 vs. 29%) and the Danish People’s Party (11,5 vs. 13,3%) is down while support for the Social Democrats (29,5 vs. 25,8%) and Socialists (8,4 vs. 6%) is up. All of which means that the opposition (including the Social Liberal Party) in the poll is supported by 50,7% of voters, while the governing coalition is supported by 48% of voters.

The next election isn’t right around the corner – even if Danish political journalists have begun to talk as if that was the case – but it is the first time since 1999 that winning popular support doesn’t look like a walk-over for the Liberals and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen