Jacob Christensen

One word: Ouch!

The summer break could be really interesting this year. Lars Løkke Rasmussen will be well advised to stay connected during his vacation.

The reader of this blog contacted me with an intriguing question, inspired by the placement of Helle Thorning-Schmidt at this week’s gala dinner in honour of Queen Margrethe II: How do we decide who the leader of the Danish opposition is?

Unlike the UK, Denmark has no formal position as leader of the opposition. Before 1901, the concept of “parliamentary opposition” was not recognised formally and after 1901 no-one seems to have cared about the position in a formal sense. The internal workings of the Liberal Party until 1945 may have played a role here: When the party was out of office, it was often difficult to figure out who the Liberals’ candidate for the position as prime minister was – consider 1910, 1920 and 1926 as cases in point. In 1932, 1935 and 1939 the party was hardly a contender for government office.

How about post-1945, then? If we look for the parliamentary leaders of the largest party not in government (shamelessly stolen from my anonymous correspondent), this is the list:

1945-1947: Hans Hedtoft
1947-1949: Knud Kristensen
1949-1950: Edvard Sørensen
1950: Erik Eriksen
1950-1953: Hans Hedtoft
1953-1965: Erik Eriksen
1965-1968: Poul Hartling
1968-1971: Jens Otto Krag
1971-1973: Erik Ninn-Hansen
1973-1975: Anker Jørgensen
1975-1977: Poul Hartling
1977-1979: Mogens Glistrup
1979-1981: Poul Schlüter/Henning Christophersen
1981-1982: Poul Schlüter
1982-1987: Anker Jørgensen
1987-1992: Svend Auken
1992-1993: Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
1993: Henning Dyremose
1993-1994: Hans Engell
1994-1998: Uffe Ellemann-Jensen
1998-2001: Anders Fogh Rasmussen
2001-2002: Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
2002-2005: Mogens Lykketoft
2005- : Helle Thorning-Schmidt

The list has some interesting cases when it comes to the eventual selection of prime ministers after a change of government or the de facto definition of the leader of the opposition:

Poul Hartling never made it to the Prime Minister’s Office after the 1968 election, if only because the Liberals lost the position as the largest centre-right party at that election, and neither did the Conservatives’ Poul Sørensen. Instead the Conservatives for a number of reasons decided to throw their weight behind the Social Liberal leader Hilmar Baunsgaard. Similarly, it can be argued that Baunsgaard was the Conservatives’ and Social Liberals’ first choice in 1973 (even if Mogens Glistrup was the leader of the second-largest party after the 1973 election).

Mogens Glistrup as prime minister? Not happening in this universe.

During the 1977-1979 parliamentary term, the question is if Henning Christophersen didn’t blow all of his chances for ever becoming prime minister by breaking the four-party centre-right cooperation in 1978 in favour of an ill-fated coalition with the Social Democrats. On the other hand, the choice of prime minister was still in the balance in the summer of 1982 – even if the odds may have favoured Poul Schlüter with 26 MPs to Henning Christophersen’s 20.

The 1993-1994 term was also pretty messy with Henning Dyremose as the original successor to Poul Schlüter before being outmanoeuvered by Hans Engell who in turn lost spectacularly to Uffe Ellemann-Jensen at the 1994 elections.

From 1994 onward, things have been more predictable – party because the Liberals have been significantly larger than the Conservatives while the Social Democrats have been out of office since 2001. But consider what would happen if the Socialists emerged as the larger of the two main left-wing parties in 2010 or 2011.

By the way: The Federal Republic of Germany also has some curious cases when it comes to identifying the leader of the opposition.

Leave aside the shenanigans surrounding Foreign Minister Lene Espersen and a humble press release from the Transport Ministry may be the single most significant piece of politics we will see during the first part of 2010.

The press release is a masterpiece of bureaucratic lingo but the essence seems to be that BaneDanmark “after making a great performance” (many travelers, especially in the Copenhagen area, will not agree) is being transferred from a state owned company back to being a – or some kind of – state agency. In any event, the board of BD gets the sack and the director of the unit will be referring directly to the ministry in the future.

The history of BaneDanmark is a complicated one but it does reflect the impact of NPM on transport policy: As part of a Europe-wide drive to introduce market-based models in rail transport, the old state railway DSB was split up into two state-owned companies (DSB – passenger traffic, DSB Gods – goods transport, sold to DB and during early 2010 operative as “DB Schenker something something”) and a state agency (Banestyrelsen) in the late 1990s. Some five years ago, the agency was turned into a state-owned company called BaneDanmark – and please don’t ask me why BranDinG exPertS alwAys hAVe to pUt capiTal letTers in the miDdle of woRds – but recently the maintenance unit was sold off, so all railway maintenance is performed by hired firms while the ownership of the track lies with BD.

In many ways the Danish rail infrastructure is not in the best of conditions: The railways around Copenhagen are underdimensioned, the signalling system pre-modern and maintenance of the tracks has been neglected for decades so trains have to tip-toe along on the worst parts of the network while urgent repairs are being carried out.

The IC4-scandal is not part of this mess but still adds to the overall picture of a railway system performing below reasonable expectations.

On top of this, traffic on the Helsingør-Copenhagen-Malmø line was privatised last year and the results have not been particularly good. Part of the blame lies in the fact the Malmø C is a massive bottleneck while the final parts of the construction of the City Tunnel are underway, but apparently no-one thought about allowing for this in the planning of the timetables and schedules for this important commuter link.

Now, the minister tells us, the reorganisation will put responsibility for train regularity in one pair of hands – a brave move considering that politicians generally prefer to claim paternity of successes and outsource responsibility for failures. Maybe the minister has noted the December 2010 deadline for the opening of the Malmø link?

Still, the reorganisation does to some extent go against the NPM/QUANGO pattern which has been a fixture of public policy since the late 1980s.

Five years is a long time in politics – especially if you are a party and a party leader with your eyes firmly set on the prime minister’s office. As of today, Helle Thorning-Schmidt is the third leader of the Social Democrats since P. Knudsen (chairman from 1882 to 1910) who haven’t made it to the top office – but unlike Svend Auken and Mogens Lykketoft, she still has a chance.¹

The selection of Thorning in 2005 was a proof of the extent of the crisis which hit the Social Democrats at the end of the 1990s. When she won the membership ballot, she had only been an MP for little under two months and her only previous experience as an elected representative was as an MEP between 1999 and 2004. In fact, finding a constituency for her for the 2005 election had been a bit of a problem. She was a long-shot candidate and part of her attraction was that she wasn’t Frank Jensen.

The closest parallel to Thorning would be Poul Nyrup Rasmussen whose career had also been as an employee in the Danish TUC system before he was elected to parliament in 1987 and became one of the party’s deputy chairmen. Machiavellian commenters might want to point out that Nyrup only became chairman because making Lykketoft leader was out of the question in 1992, but unlike Nyrup, Thorning for better and for worse does not have her own Lykketoft to deal with.

So, how far has the party come since 2010? The membership party is still a only shadow of past glories, although this is part of a broader development, and the share of the vote in national elections is flat. If it wasn’t for the surprising resurgence of SF, the left wing might have had class but it still wouldn’t be a contender for government power. In many ways, the party still feels insecure about its political positions and over-all role in the political system.

Reversing the rupture of 1999 has been beyond Thorning’s powers – but maybe her unorthodox background can also be also her strength in this respect: Unlike old-school Social Democrats she may be better at adapting to a situation where the Social Democrats are still the largest party of the left but no longer the dominating force. These days, Denmark has moved from the classical dominant Social Democrats-type of party system and is more like Finland with four larger parties and a number of smaller ones making up the national political scene. Surprises still happen in politics, but the prospect of a Social Democratic party winning 35-40 per cent of the national vote seems increasingly unlikely.

1. For politics nerds: Thorning is the fourth chairman since Knudsen who has not been prime minister. Alsing Andersen had to step in as party chairman between 1941 and 1945 when the Germans forced Hans Hedtoft out of office. Vilhelm Buhl was prime minister 1942 and 1945 but never acted as leader of the party [↩]

I considered writing a post about Lars Løkke’s anniversary but then I realised that I had published comments on his speech at the opening of the 2009-2010 parliamentary year and his New Year’s speech which in many ways still stand.

So, I point you to: 1. The Prime Minister Speaks (October 2009) and 2. The Prime Minister’s New Year’s Speech (January 2010).