Free How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark by Patrick Kingsley Page B

on something very deep in the heart of the Danish sense of nationality.”
    Indeed, when Denmark initially voted against joining the EU in 1992, it was not simply because of a knee-jerk reaction from right-wingers. A great deal of the Eurosceptism came from Danes who feared that diktats from Brussels could eventually undermine the independence of Denmark’s welfare model.
    Venstre is a funny name. Often translated as “the Liberal Party”, it literally means “Left”, which is amusing given the conservative role they now play in Danish politics. It’s a hangover from the 19th century, when they were created in opposition to Højre, a party that literally meant “Right”. Nor is Venstre the only odd feature of Danish political nomenclature. In the political drama Borgen , the fictional prime minister Birgitte Nyborg is the leader of the Moderates, a party based on the real-life Radikale Venstre. Literally translated as “the Radical Left”, Radikale Venstre is in fact neither left nor radical. The result of a schism in Venstre during the early 1900s, the mild-mannered group sits slap bang in the centre of Danish politics – more socially liberal than Venstre, but too economically liberal for the Social Democrats.
    The latter were the defining force of Danish politics in the 20th century, though they were locked out of power for the first decade of the 21st. Founded not long after Venstre in 1871, the Social Democrats rose to prominence in the turbulent 20s, as Denmark’s finances collapsed, and the electorate grew frightened of Venstre’s by now ardently capitalist approach. As in much of Europe, unemploymenthad rocketed, the farming industry was close to ruin, and extremist political parties were gathering momentum. Once in power, the Social Democrats attempted to fight these problems with what is now known as the Kanslergade Agreement, a huge raft of reforms agreed after much debate with the three other main parties. Signed the day Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, it formalised labour rights, introduced state support for the economy, and gave large subsidies to the farmers. It was a seismic moment, not just because it was another large step towards the Danish welfare state that was finally realised in the 70s, but because it helped solidify a nascent model for consensus-based politics in Denmark – the kind which is dramatised to such acclaim in Borgen and the first series of The Killing .
    It required the agreement of the four major parties of the time, and so all four had to compromise. Conscious that a failure to reach an agreement might undermine the legitimacy of parliament and lead – eventually – to fascism, Venstre backtracked on its previous opposition to social reforms. The Social Democrats retreated from some of their more Marxist policies, and so created a politics of compromise that has been a central part of the Danish parliament ever since. No party has held absolute power for a century now, while each of the four oldest parties has, with the exception of the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, been in coalition with each of the others. This is to a large extent also due to the Danish system of proportional representation, which guarantees at least one seat to any partythat wins more than 2% of the national vote, and which therefore makes it almost impossible for any party to win an overall majority. But it is also testament to the importance the Danes place on working together.
    The wrangling you see in Borgen is apparently not that great a departure from the machinations of most recent real-life elections – with one key difference. In the real world, all the parties approach the election in two broad coalitions – one on the left and one on the right – and whichever bloc wins more than half of the Folketinget’s 179 seats forms a government. The decisions about which parties will be allied to whom, who will be prime minister, and which politicians would hold which cabinet