Helle Thorning-Schmidt
Helle Thorning-Schmidt was prime minister of Denmark from 2011 to 2015, the first woman, the Social Democrat who won the election of September 2011 with the party's worst result since 1903 and a majority for the left bloc, and governed a coalition with the Radicals and the Socialist People's Party that did what the Liberals would have done and was punished for it. There was the corporation tax cut, the unemployment benefit period halved as the previous government had legislated, and the disability pension and student grant reforms. There was the sale of eighteen per cent of the state energy company DONG to Goldman Sachs in 2014 that split the coalition and sent the Socialists out. There were the teachers locked out for a month in 2013 to impose longer hours, the budget kept within the European rules through the recession, and the immigration line kept where the Liberals had put it. The economy grew, unemployment fell, and the party's voters did not forgive the twelve minutes more a day, the working-time extension she had campaigned on, or the election promises that the Radicals' economics had replaced, and the Gucci-Helle name for her handbags was the country's comment. She was born in Rødovre in 1966, studied political science at Copenhagen and at the College of Europe in Bruges, worked for the Danish trade unions in Brussels, sat in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. She took the party's leadership in 2005 after Nyrup's successor lost, the first woman to lead it. Her husband, the son of the British Labour leader Kinnock, was a Labour MP from 2015, and the tax-residence question over him was the campaign issue of 2010. The Copenhagen shootings of February 2015, at a free-speech debate and a synagogue, and the selfie with Obama and Cameron at Mandela's memorial in December 2013 were the images. She lost the election of June 2015 to Løkke's bloc by two seats with the party's vote up. She resigned the same night, and was chief executive of Save the Children International from 2016 to 2019. She has since sat on Meta's oversight board as a co-chair, ruling on Trump's suspension in 2021, which is a Danish social democrat's afterlife.
- Lived: 1966 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
