That little girl is now running for her third term as prime minister of Denmark in an election set for Tuesday.
Written by Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli
Flemming Frederiksen, a retired typesetter and union leader, remembers coming home from work years ago, exhausted and ready for a break, only to find his daughter standing on the front steps of their red-roofed cottage with her arms crossed.
“I have four questions for you today,” the middle-schooler announced.
“Can I first just get inside, take off my jacket and have a slice of rye bread and cheese?” he asked.
She peppered him with inquiries on politics. She pressed him to sign petitions to stop animal testing and save the whales. Only grudgingly did she accept compromises, he said.
That little girl is now running for her third term as prime minister of Denmark in an election set for Tuesday.
When asked if he could have predicted this back then, Frederiksen smiled and said, “I don’t want to sound like a smartass, but I’m not surprised.”
Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s leader, has become the biggest political force this little country has seen in decades. When she took office in 2019, she etched herself into Danish history by becoming the youngest prime minister. Now 48, if she wins and serves out her term, she will be the longest-serving Danish premier since World War II.
Most Danes don’t call her prime minister or even “PM.” They simply call her “Mette.” She’s become an almost Thatcherite presence in Scandinavia, with the same words used to describe her as the legendary Iron Lady: “strong-willed,” “tough,” “a force of nature.”
President Donald Trump got a taste of her grit when he tried to push around Denmark and take over Greenland, a gigantic island in the Arctic that has been part of the Danish kingdom for more than 300 years. Frederiksen pushed back. Trump got angry. For the time being at least, he seems to have moved on.
Still, her dominance has become a double-edged sword.
Many voters in this country of 6 million credit her with protecting Greenland and keeping the kingdom intact. Her party has leaned into this. A recent social media post said, “We live in uncertain times and Denmark needs a steady hand.”
But some Danes are also itching for change.
“She has done a good, good job but, we are getting tired of Mette,” said Lars-Peter Boel, a chicken farmer. “When she speaks, she is talking like a mom, like she is talking down to people.”
Her party, the Social Democrats, is No. 1 in the polls, but Denmark’s political scene is so fragmented, with more than 10 parties represented in parliament, that it’s unlikely the Social Democrats will win more than a quarter of the vote. The most likely outcome, many political analysts believe, is a reshuffled coalition government with her at the head.
Another possibility is an upset, with Frederiksen out and a new government run by Troels Lund Poulsen, the defense minister and head of one of Denmark’s strongest conservative parties.
Frederiksen has molded herself into an exemplar of Europe’s new left. Historically, her party has been a workers’ party. But in recent years it has shifted to the right on immigration — Denmark has imposed some of the strictest asylum rules in Europe. She’s also a serious hawk in foreign policy, thrusting Denmark front and center into Europe’s efforts to back Ukraine against the encroachments of an increasingly acquisitive Russia.
Recently, though, Frederiksen seems to be tacking left again, and embracing a potential wealth tax. Critics wonder if she’s doing this purely to cozy up to the left-wing parties that are polling well and whose votes she may need to build a coalition. The wealth tax, which many Danes call “the jealousy tax,” has upset some of her moderate supporters and the titans of Danish industry, like the heads of Maersk shipping and Lego.
From the start, Frederiksen has moved through the world with elbows out. Her father, who offered to give a little tour of the street she lived on, her old school and her old house, remembered how she was socked in the face by a skinhead in high school for standing up for immigrant children. It was an ordeal she shared with him only many years later and which has been chronicled in a political biography.
“She wasn’t very old before she figured out where she stood,” he said.
Her father and others credit her upbringing with shaping her values. She grew up in Aalborg, a working-class city in the Jutland region near Denmark’s northern tip. Smokestacks from a cement factory smudge out the sun. There used to be even more industry, like big shipyards employing thousands of people.
Today Aalborg hums with Scandinavian efficiency. Parents ride their kids to school in dedicated bike lanes. No garbage blows on the streets. A gleaming public pool offers an ice bath and several saunas. In a two-day visit, we didn’t hear a single raised voice or the honk of a horn.
Maiken Hedegaard Brondum, a human resources consultant in Aalborg, said she leans left politically but doesn’t like Frederiksen’s party because of its hardening position on immigrants.
“They are too strict with immigration,” Brondum said. “We need to help the people that need it.”
Brondum, 48, met Frederiksen when they were 6. As children, they ran a small “detective agency” and later an amateur environmental club. Though they remained close into their teenage years, Frederiksen’s growing focus on politics eventually pulled them in different directions — and today, Brondum no longer feels politically aligned with her childhood friend.
“The Social Democrats are too much on the right for me,” she said. “But I still hope she wins. Simply because I cannot see the other side doing anything I would agree with.”
The other night, Frederiksen returned to Aalborg for a campaign event at a high school, at home and casual in jeans, a green sweater and pointy gold shoes. She strode onstage, taking a seat between a journalist and a former prime minister. She was the only woman onstage, a familiar position.
She spoke about a potential social media ban for children and the perils of too much screen time. She discussed a hot local issue: nitrates from fertilizer leaching into the water supply.
She lamented the ideological challenges of leading a hydra-headed coalition and how the compromises necessary to keep the government together inevitably watered down some of her party’s more forceful policies.
But it was when the subject turned to geopolitics that her eyes really lit up.
“This is the 10th election campaign I’ve been part of,” she told the audience. “In all those years, I have never experienced global affairs and foreign policy filling so many of my conversations with Danes.”
After applause, she stepped down from the stage, hugged some old friends, posed for some selfies and signed the leg of one young admirer’s jeans.
She even squeezed in a quick interview as the crowd filtered out, leaving the auditorium big and empty. It was nearly 10 p.m.
When asked how she felt about Trump’s backing down on Greenland, she said, “I feel better.”
“Right now we are quite happy that we succeeded in bringing this discussion into a more traditional political diplomatic atmosphere,” she said.
She was referring to negotiations involving the White House, Denmark and Greenland, and she uttered a line that could have come from Trump himself.
“Hopefully, we will be able to reach a deal,” she said.
Then she walked out into the brisk night air, stepped into a sleek van and roared away.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
