Frederik X
Frederik X has been King of Denmark since 14 January 2024, when his mother Margrethe II abdicated after fifty-two years and the prime minister proclaimed him from the balcony of Christiansborg to a crowd the police put at three hundred thousand, the first Danish king in nearly nine centuries to take the throne from a living predecessor; his motto, chosen that day, is united, committed, for the Kingdom of Denmark, and the kingdom in question includes Greenland and the Faroes, which a year into his reign became the subject of an American president's ambitions. He was born in 1968, the elder son of the crown princess and the French-born Prince Henrik, and grew up in the monarchy's transition from the reserved to the informal, an unhappy, shy boy by his own later account. He found himself in the navy's frogman corps, whose course he completed in 1995 as the first royal to do so, and in the expedition that crossed northern Greenland by dog sled in 2000, four months and 2,800 kilometres. He studied political science at Aarhus and Harvard, served at the United Nations mission in New York and the embassy in Paris, and married in 2004 an Australian marketing executive, Mary Donaldson, whom he had met in a Sydney pub during the Olympics of 2000, and who has been the more popular of the two since. As crown prince he ran marathons and the Ironman, sat on the International Olympic Committee, and took on the climate and business diplomacy that Danish exports depend on. The abdication came without warning in the queen's New Year's speech, two months after a Spanish magazine had photographed him on an evening out in Madrid with a Mexican socialite, which the palace did not discuss. His first year was the ordinary round of a constitutional monarch who signs what the government sends him, until in December 2024 and January 2025 the returning American president said the United States needed Greenland and would not rule out force. The king changed the royal coat of arms to give the polar bear of Greenland and the ram of the Faroes more room, and went to Greenland in April 2025 to be seen there. He and Queen Mary have four children. Christian, born in 2005, is crown prince.
- Lived: 1968 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: king, monarch
