Jacob Christensen

1. Morten Messerschmidt is now as big as his posters: #2 on the all-time hit-list for personal votes in an EP election in Denmark. He is ahead of Poul Schlüter (1994) before the big metropolitan districts have reported. Bertel Haarder (1999) and Lone Dybkjær (1994, 1999) have also been left behind.

2. Jarl Cordua asks (well, assumes) that the Social Liberals actually performed better than they would have otherwise because of the lead candidate Sofie Carsten Nielsen. I haven’t seen any Danish research about this, but Swedish electoral researchers have discussed the topic with regard to national elections and are sceptical about the effects of candidates. However: 1. EP elections are not national elections and 2. the Danish and the Swedish electoral systems are different when it comes to personal votes. Still, Cordua is right in pointing out that we cannot say that SCN caused the Social Liberal loss because the SL share of the vote was lower in 2009 than in 2004.

As my colleague Flemming Juul Christiansen noted:

1953: Yes – 45,8%; No (incl blank)- 12,8%
2009: Yes – 45,1%; No (incl blank) – 13,0%

For the odd non-Danish reader: The 2009 European Parliament election has its first Danish casualty as the June Movement will be calling it a day after failing to get an MEP elected.

JM was formed in 1993 in the run-up to the referendum on the Edinburgh Treaty and placed itself as a “yes-to-the-EC, no-to-the-EU” alternative to the People’s Movement’s more principled anti-EC/EU position.

Across Europe there is some discussion about voters using the EP election to punish governments. How does this look in Denmark?

One problem is that Denmark used to have distinct national and European party systems so comparisons between elections to the Folketing and the EP are often bound to be misleading but if we look at 2004 (EP), 2005 (National), 2007 (National) and 2009 (EP), it looks like this:

Liberals 19,4 – 29,0 – 25,5 – 19,6
Conservatives: 11,3 – 10,3 – 10,4 – 12,3
Danish People’s: 6,8 – 13,3 – 13,8 – 14,8
Total: 37,5 – 53,6 – 49,7 – 46,7

Generally, the Liberals perform badly in EP elections. The “we’re Eurosceptics, no really”-take didn’t pay off here. What is new, is that the DF now has the same strength in national and EP elections.

Social Democrats: 32,6 – 25,8 – 25,5 – 20,9
Socialists: 8,0 – 6,0 – 13,0 – 15,4
Social Liberals: 6,4 – 9,2 – 5,1 – 4,1
Total: 47,0 – 41,0 – 43,6 – 40,4

The Social Democrats are back to the 1990s. Losing Poul Nyrup was too much of a handicap.

Red-Green Alliance x – 3,4 -2,2 – x
June Movement: 9,1,- x – x- 2,3
People’s Movement: 5,2 – x – x – 7,0
Total: 14,3 – 3,4 – 2,2 – 9,3

Okay, this combination isn’t fair. But you can see that the dedicated anti-EU parties have lost 5 points of the vote. Bandwagon effect for the People’s Movement.

There are some percentage points floating around, but I don’t have the time to do anything decent today.