The Great Nordic Thread

[rosin]

It seems like the Danish liberal party Venstre has been dug down into a pretty deep hole by the expenses of the party's leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen.

In a brand new Megafon poll is Venstre down on 14,5%, less than 3/5 of the party's result at the 2011 election.
Moreover, this poll is the first one since the 2011 election, where the center-left bloc has a majority.

Full poll:



Edit: The leader board of Venstre plan an extraordinary meeting tomorrow. With this poll in recent memory, I don't think the meeting will be boring...

[rosin]

How does this poll work? A+B+F+Red-Green only gets them to 47.9%...

Well, as far as my calculation goes, ABFØ is at 50.8% and CIVO is at 47.8%. Then I guess that the 1.4%, which doesn't lead to any representation (0.8% for list K + 0.6% for others (øvrige)) has been shared equally to make the vote on the blocs total 100%.


EDIT: Ah, maybe you have used the numbers from the middle column. That is the numbers of the pollster's former poll, the new poll are the rightmost numbers

[rosin]

The Danish MEP Rikke Karlsson has decided to leave the DPP. She says that the primary reason is that she was pushed to sign documents stating that she, among other things, had participated in meetings in the Euro-parties Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy and Foundation for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy. However, she claims never to have participated in any meetings, and after several rejected requests of more information about these parties, she decided to leave.
It will of course be interesting to see whether the Eurosceptic DPP has in fact meddled with documents in order to collect as much money from the system as possible. This could create a minor backlash for the party. However, Karlsson's exit is also another damning indictment of Morten Messerschmidt's leader skills. In the previous term, the fellow DPP MEP Anna Rosbach left the party midway through the term after severe conflicts with him, and it is quite clearly a chemistry question this time as well. Messerschmidt is a very intelligent and charismatic politician, he led the DPP to a victory in the EP elections 2014 with the highest number of personal votes ever, but he is also extremely arrogant. His lacking leadership abilities might put into question his role as the heir apparent in the DPP. Not that Thulelsen Dahl is likely to leave anytime soon.

And now Thulesen Dahl's response on the matter has arrived. He says basically that there are no problems at all with Morten Messerschmidt's refusal to make specific documents from the EP party association MELD and its associated fund FELD public.

Interesting (to put it mildly) that DPP's "show us everything"-principles (latest seen when Søren Espersen urged Carl Holst to publicize all information about his advisor's role in Holst's electoral campaign - the affair that lead to Holst's exit from the Ministry of Defense) are bendable when the matter is about one of DPP's great electoral successes.

[rosin]

Eva Kjer Hansen resigns

The threatening crisis in the Danish "blue bloc" described by Diouf in the previous post have now been - temporarily? - avoided, as the minister of food production and environmental affairs, Eva Kjer Hansen, has resigned this morning. This is widely seen as a defeat for PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who now might look as if he isn't able to hold his government together, and similarily a big victory for the leader of the Conservatives, Søren Pape Poulsen, who - since he in 2014 became chairman for the party - widely has been viewed as a political light-weighter.

The future implications of will likely be that the cooperation in the bloc becomes harder - since it is now clearly seen, that the government is not set in stone, and the government's other supporting parties - LA and DF - might now also try to remove ministers, they - by some reason - are dissatisfied with.