Poul Nyrup Rasmussen
Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was prime minister of Denmark from 1993 to 2001, the trade-union economist who took the Social Democrats from Svend Auken in a party vote of 1992 and the government from Schlüter without an election when the Tamil case broke in January 1993. He governed eight years of a coalition with the Radicals and, at first, the Centre Democrats and Christians, in which the welfare state was made active. There was the labour market reform of 1994 that turned unemployment benefit into a duty to train or work, which cut the jobless rate from twelve per cent to five and became the flexicurity that the OECD sent everyone to study. There were the leave schemes, the child care guarantee, the Øresund bridge to Sweden opened in 2000, the budget in surplus and the debt falling. There was the referendum of May 1993 that reversed the Maastricht no with four opt-outs and set off the Nørrebro riot in which the police fired on the crowd, and the referendum of September 2000 on the euro that the country rejected by fifty-three per cent. There was the early election of November 2001, called after 11 September on the ground that the country needed stability, in which Fogh Rasmussen's Liberals became the largest party for the first time since 1920 on the question of immigration, which the government had not thought was the question. He was born in Esbjerg in 1943, the son of a dock worker, studied economics at Copenhagen, was the chief economist of the trade union federation LO from 1980 and the director of the workers' pension fund. He entered parliament in 1988 as the party's economic voice, the man in the bicycle helmet whose helmet became the joke. The years also had the Danish soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo, the first fighting deployments since 1864, the Maastricht opt-outs on defence and the euro that the country has since kept and half-kept, and the Rushdie protection and the Tvind school scandal that the courts settled. He led the party in opposition until 2002. He sat in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2009 and led the Party of European Socialists from 2004 to 2011, writing a book on the locusts, the private equity funds, that the Union's directive of 2011 answered. His wife, Lone Dybkjær, was a Radical minister and a member of the European Parliament, the country's first political couple.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: prime minister, economist, politician
