Election news in brief: Alternativet storms into Parliament

Strong result for Uffe Elbæk’s new party

Jun 19, 2015

The election was a resounding success for Alternativet. The new party, which was founded in late 2013, won 4.8 percent of the votes, which secures it nine seats in Parliament.

This morning, Uffe Elbæk, the party’s founder and leader gave his reaction to the dramatic election in a status update on his Facebook profile.

“I’m feeling mega ambivalent,” he said.

“On the one hand it’s a massive, massive political performance Alternativet has given. Nine seats. That’s too wild. So thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who had the courage to vote for us. It was a vote for a greener, more empathic and creative Denmark. On the other hand, it’s almost unbearable that the centre-left lost the election and that Denmark’s first female prime minister stepped down.”

Yayah Hassan fails to win seat

It was a less successful election for the young poet Yayha Hassan who fell far short of the 20,000 votes needed to win a seat as an independent candidate, with just 937 votes cast in his favour in the Østjyllands Storkreds constituency.

In April Hassan announced his candidacy as a member of Denmark’s other newly-formed political party Nationalpartiet. However members of the party were forced to give up running under the party’s flag, since it failed to secure the necessary voter declarations for it to appear on the ballot sheet, and they instead ran as independents.

READ NEWS: Nationalpartiet throws in the towel

Voter turnout down

Early counts put voter turnout in the election at 85.8 percent, down from 87.7 percent in the last general election in 2011. This figure doesn’t include invalid and blank ballot papers, so the final count could be slightly higher. The highest turnout in Denmark’s history was recorded in 1943 when 89.5 percent of the electorate voted.

Candidates in high spirits

The Twittersphere responded enthusiastically to the election-night antics of candidates Henrik Sass Larsen and Carsten Larsen, who were re-elected for Socialdemokraterne.

Sass Larsen was interviewed on TV2 News standing next to Carsten Hansen. Both were holding a beer and Sass Larsen spoke as though it wasn’t his first of the evening. The interviewer asked him if the beer he was holding was a ‘wake beer’, but the politician slurred a convoluted reply, saying that he wasn’t mourning the result and that the electorate was always right.

Tweeting yesterday, when the outcome of the election was still uncertain, user @NSchouser wrote “The only thing that’s certain at the moment: Henrik Sass Larsen has a hangover tomorrow!”