Mette Frederiksen
Mette Frederiksen has been prime minister of Denmark since June 2019, the youngest in the country's history at forty-one and the second woman, the Social Democrat who took her party to the right on immigration and the left on welfare and made that the formula for winning, who governed the pandemic by closing the country early and ordering seventeen million mink killed, which cost her a commission of inquiry and nearly her office, who formed in December 2022 the first government across the centre since the 1970s, and who in January 2025 found herself telling an American president that Greenland was not for sale. She was born in Aalborg in 1977 into a family of trade unionists, was elected to the Folketing at twenty-four in 2001, and served as employment minister and then justice minister in the Social Democratic government of 2011, where she cut unemployment benefit and introduced the burqa ban's predecessors. She took the party leadership after the defeat of 2015 and turned it. It became a Social Democracy that would cap non-Western immigration, deport rejected asylum seekers to reception centres abroad, and defend the welfare state against the cost of newcomers, an argument she made in the language of the working-class voters the party had been losing to the Danish People's Party. The election of June 2019 gave the left bloc a majority and her a single-party minority government. Denmark closed its borders and schools on 11 March 2020, among the first in Europe, and in November she ordered the culling of the entire mink herd over a mutated coronavirus without the legal power to do so. The inquiry in 2022 found the order unlawful and her conduct highly reprehensible, and she called an election that her party won on the promise of a broad government. The coalition with the Liberals and the Moderates of the former Liberal prime minister Lokke Rasmussen, formed in December 2022, abolished a public holiday to pay for defence. When Donald Trump said in January 2025 that the United States needed Greenland and would not exclude force, she went to Berlin, Paris and Brussels for support and told him that the island's future was Greenland's to decide. A Danish opinion poll found her the most trusted person in the country to handle him.
- Lived: 1977 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
