Israel & Denmark Vote: In With the Old?
In Israel it’s back to Bibi. In Denmark, the status quo, despite those 17 million minks and lots more.
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world, the focus this week is on Israel—whose democracy is going through trying times—and Denmark, where a snap election that left little changed.
Updating in boldface with overnight returns that have given incumbent Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen an unexpectedly strong new grip on her office and confirmed an apparently potent win for Israel’s Netanyahu and his far-right bloc.
First, Israel
Looks like it’s Bibi again. Israeli exit polls, confirmed by overnight returns from 84% of the country, show the veteran prime minister will be returning to power with a powerful, absolute majority for his traditional coalition in the Knesset, the nation’s parliament. As Benjamin Netanyahu told his cheering supporters in Jerusalem, "The people have undergone a change in the past 18 months," they want to “restore national pride, and a government that projects power, not weakness."
At the same time, while his Likud apparently failed to capture an absolute majority in the Knesset, he will have to govern with some far-right supporters, especially Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose Religious Zionism bloc appears set to become the third-largest party.
This explosion of support for the deeply anti-Arab firebrand has alarmed Palestinians and troubled some allies, especially the United States. Gvir is the spiritual heir of Meir Kahane who in 1968 in New York founded the radical Jewish Defense League, later branded a terrorist organization. “For too long, the Jewish people have been patsies,” he told me in 1971 for a profile in The New York Times. Eventually, Kahane emigrated to Israel and was quickly elected to the Knesset. Now his heirs expect to play an importan role in Netanyahu’s new government .
There were only three, utterly related issues you needed to keep in mind for Tuesday’s election in Israel. First, it is the fifth such contest in four years—a string without precedent. Second, it’s the first time in 13 years that Bibi Netanyahu was on the ballot not as in incumbent, seeking a return to power as the nation’s leader. Still, there were 40 parties all vying for a slice of the action. And at the center—Bibi.
The hope of many Israelis has been that an absolute majority for Netanyahu and his coalition of right-wing, orthodox parties, could guarantee at least some stability at the top. After all, and this was Bibi’s argument from the get-go, Israel’s existence is still challenged, even threatened by violent forces, even governments, that want it erased entirely from the community of nations. Indeed, since Andelman Unleashed is now engaged with chronicling every election in the world, it’s worth pointing out that the 10 elections Israel has held in the last 20 years may itself be a record among nations. A record it is craving to erase.
There were a host of critical issues at play in these elections, many of them playing directly into Bibi’s hands. These included an expansion of Israeli settlements into what should be Palestinian territory as well as security from attacks by Palestinian and other terrorist forces which have proliferated this year. Then there is inflation which is beginning to strike fear into a broad range of Israeli households. While the surge in price has not passed the 5% mark, it is still running at a rate twice that of a year ago as Netanyahu was leaving power.
Finally, there is the hard political reality that there have been 19 parties in the Knesset (ranging from 1 seat to 29 in the 120-member body) and at least another two dozen battling to get in. Indeed in total, there were 40 parties on Tuesday’s ballot. Or, as the local joke goes, get three Jews together in a room and you’ll quickly have five political parties. In Israel’s entire history back to independence in 1948, no one party has ever won an absolute majority in the Knesset. Indeed, even Netanyahu will need to govern with a coalition, though one that he has long and successfully controlled. The closest to an absolute majority for one party was back in 1969 when Alignment—the party of legendary Israeli Leaders Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Simon Peres—accumulated 56 votes. That was when Golda Meir became prime minister. Tuesday night, exit polls showed Netanyahu’s party itself would net 30 to 32 seats.
But basically, as has the case of so many Israeli electoral contests in this century, all issues boiled down to a single question—Bibi yay or Bibi nay? Netanyahu himself has cast the vote as protecting the Jewish state from attack—from within or without. “We don’t want a government with the Muslim Brotherhood, who support terrorism, deny the existence of Israel and are pretty hostile to the United States,” Netanyahu told a CNN reporter who snagged him at his voting place Tuesday morning in Jerusalem. “That is what we are going to bring.”
Still, Netanyahu is so roundly disliked by a sufficiently large slice of the political class, which point to his indictment in three cases of political corruption, that his Likud party, which held a plurality of 29 seats in the outgoing Knesset, found last time around there were not enough others prepared to join him in a coalition.
A return to office could also mean an end to these debilitating corruption prosecutions that dogged much of his last term in office.
For the past year, it fell to the center-left leader Yair Lapid to assemble a coalition with Naftali Bennett, each rotating into the leadership role and seek some political stability that proved all but elusive. Lapid, a journalist who became a politician, born into a family filled with distinguished journalist-politicos, went into Tuesday’s vote as the incumbent prime minister and was hoping to repeat his feat from earlier this year. That does not appear to have worked. Bibi is back, and quite possibly stronger than ever.
Then there’s Denmark ….
Denmark looked to be in for a transformationl change of the nation’s electoral landscape, but in the end voters returned to office the Social Democratic prime minister and her center-left “red” coalition, whose tenure had been marked with controversy and questions.
Although her gain was only a slim two seats in the parliament, it was the best result in two decades. And, though, the 90 seats for her coalition in the 179-seat Folketing does give her the right to form a government on her own, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she would form a broader coalition.
Any such will likely include members of the centrist Moderate party formed just five months ago by the folksy and much-liked former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen. He’d hoped that a loss last night by Federiksen’s ‘reds’ might make him a king-maker. Still, the Moderates will be the third-largets bloc in the parliament.
Frederiksen told supporters early Wednesday that she will tender her resignation to Queen Margrethe II, 82, who’s just celebrated her 50th year on the throne. With the death of her distant cousin Queen Elizabeth II, she is now Europe’s long-serving head of state and the world’s only reigning queen.
Exit polls Tuesday evening had suggested that the snap national vote would leave the Prime Minister short of the absolute majority she’d need to continue in power.
It’s hard not to love the primary reason Denmark went to the polls on Tuesday for this sudden, unanticipated election that threatened to upend the political construct of this ordinarily placid, low-key Nordic nation.
The proximate reason for the vote were the 17 million minks that Frederiksen ordered executed at the peak of the covid epidemic in 2020. Not only was virtually the entire mink population slaughtered, many were poorly buried, ultimately festering, then incinerated.
This panic decision—taken with barely an hour’s discussion in the cabinet, when Frederiksen was led to believe they might harbor covid strains that could jump to humans—was followed by instant messages exchanged in the aftermath that were set to auto-delete. Even worse, it turned out, with one stroke her move destroyed the nation’s entire mink industry, the world’s largest producer, which had held 40% of the global market worth $500 million in pelts that Denmark exported each year. With this extermination went the livelihood of 3,000 mink farmers and breeders. The government was on the hook for 19 billion kroner ($2.5 billion) in compensation to the farmers. And then there was the world’s largest fur auction house, Kopenhagen Fur, which has just gone into liquidation. The industry there appears dead. Only 13 licenses have been requested to resume mink farming next year.
There was more in store for Frederiksen since minkgate reared its ugly claws—reports her government helped the US spy on European politicians, arresting the former leader of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) on charges of leaking secrets to six individuals including two journalists. She was caught flatfooted when the Nordstream pipeline carrying Russian gas to western Europe was sabotaged off the Danish coast, most likely on Kremlin orders.
Parliament had enough. Losing a vote of confidence, it was to the ballot boxes. Frederiksen called the timing of the vote most unfortunate. As she put it “in the middle of an international crisis (Russia-Ukraine), a security crisis, an energy crisis and an economic crisis.” Which hardly deterred Italy or Sweden from their elections in recent weeks that saw far-right parties surging into their leaderships.
There’s actually a lot of similarities between the Israeli and Danish political landscapes. In Denmark, 14 political parties are reprsented in the parliament.
Despite all her not inconsiderable political baggage, Frederiksen, a likeable political force while leading her Social Democratic government since 2019, has throughout maintained her sang froid and expected to be returned to office. Unlike neighboring Sweden which swung quite dramatically to the right in its elections in September, Denmark has chosen to go back to the future and stay with its center-left incumbent.
About the only item the entire political spectrum could agree on going into the vote was how to deal with the vast numbers of asylum-seekers that have proliferated in recent years. The solution the government found was simple—send them to Rwanda. Frederiksen signed a deal with the government of Rwanda to "jointly explore" the possibility of sending "spontaneous asylum seekers" who arrive in Denmark to Rwanda "for consideration of the asylum applications and protection, and the option of settling in Rwanda." The whole item was not without precedent, all part of a solution to what the prime minister has called repeatedly “a broken system.” Last April, the government signed a $15 million deal with Kosovo to take 300 foreign prisoners languishing in Danish jails and lodge then in a facility near the capital, Pristina.
None of this has hurt Frederiksen in her dealing with the still-powerful, far-right Danish People’s Party and other parties that the center-left prime minister may now be hoping to include in some capacity in her formation of a new government.
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We’ll continue to follow these elections, of course, to the finish. Be sure to check back regularly for updates that will be in boldface.
This has been quite clearly an epiphanal year that Andelman Unleashed has been chronicling as the global hard right has been swept into power or accumulated powerful positions in such disparate nations as Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Kenya, the Philippines even France….And corrupt incumbencies with roots in these such forces have managed to retain power in other nations. We will continue to chronicle these new power centers and the forces that oppose them as a central theme of Andelman Unleashed. Next up, perhaps winding up the year, is the snap election in Malaysia on November 19, followed by Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Fiji, winding up with Guinea-Bissau on December 18.
Is the Queen still available in Denmark?