Jacob Christensen

In case you haven’t already added Kai Arzheimer’s blog to your feed-reader, check out his attempts at playing a couple of voting aids for the European Parliament election.

And this was where I landed on votematch.eu:

The thing is: There is a referendum on an amendment to the Act of Succession attached to the European Parliament election, but the really big question is if the amendment will make it or if the entire Danish political elite will be standing with egg on their faces on Sunday night next week.

The short story is this: Back in 1915 (!), the Liberal leader J.C. Christensen wanted to block possible later attempts by the Social Liberals and Social Democrats to introduce a more radical constitution so as a conservative guarantee he had a provision that any later changes to the Danish constitution had to be passed by to consecutive parliaments and a referendum where 45% of all eligible voters voted in favour of the new constitution.

In 1920, the reunification with Sønderjylland meant that the consitution had to be amended slightly, but despite the overwhelming support for the reunification, only 47,5% of all voters voted in favour of the amendment while 1,5% voted against. It was a close shave.

In 1939, Christensen got his revenge (even if he had been dead for 9 years by then) when a proposal supported by the Social Democrats, the Social Liberals and the Conservatives was narrowly defeated as only 44,5% voted yes and 3,9% no. Interestingly, the 1953 constitutional reform was more controversial: 45,8% yes-votes against 12,3% no-votes. One important part of the 1953 constitution was a lowering of the threshold to 40%, another the introduction of article 20.2 which opens for referendums on the transfer of sovereignty to international organs following the normal rules for referendums (30% no-votes needed to block a proposal)

As we all know, Danish governments have won two and lost two article 20.2 referendums since 1953¹, lost four and won one under article 42 and won three and lost one under article 29 (voting age, in case you wonder), but we haven’t had a constitutional referendum for 56 years. In short: Nobody knows how the Act of Succession will fare even if 86% of voters say they are in favour of introducing full primogeniture. However, with an expected turn-out hovering around 48% – and given the extremely lacklustre campaign a lower turn-out shouldn’t be ruled out – we are now really close to the 40%.

The Prime Minister’s Office has launched a campaign promoting the amendment to the Act of Succession – which in itself is interesting and constutitionally questionable – and placed advertisements to be shown in DR TV’s OBS-slots (usually at 1 am Sunday night) – which might be even more questionable. And Billed-Bladet, the self-declared “Royal Magazine of Denmark”? Not a word.

PS: You want fact-sheets on Danish referendums? Here goes.

1. The 1993 referendum was under article 42 [↩]