Poul Schlüter
Poul Schlüter was prime minister of Denmark from 1982 to 1993, the first Conservative to hold the office since 1901 and the longest-serving of the century after Stauning, the lawyer who took over a country with a deficit of ten per cent of output, inflation at ten and a foreign debt that had the newspapers talking of the abyss. He ran ten years of four-party minority governments that cut the automatic wage indexation, froze public spending, pegged the krone to the Deutschmark and made the current account positive for the first time in a generation, the potato cure of 1986 that ended the consumer boom being the sharpest medicine. The footnote years, in which the parliament's alternative majority of the left made Denmark add reservations to every NATO communiqué on nuclear weapons that the government had to carry to Brussels, ended with the election of 1988. The referendum of 1986 that he called on the Single European Act and won by fifty-six per cent was the first of Denmark's European votes, of which the no to Maastricht in June 1992, a year before he fell, was the second. He was born in Tønder in 1929, studied law at Aarhus and Copenhagen, led the Conservative youth, and entered parliament in 1964. He took the party in 1974 at nine per cent, bringing it to twenty-three by 1984 and to the head of the government when the Social Democrat Anker Jørgensen gave up in September 1982 rather than make the cuts. The Tamil case ended him. His justice minister had illegally stopped the family reunification of Tamil refugees in 1987-88, and the ombudsman had found it. Schlüter had told the parliament in 1989 that nothing had been swept under the carpet, which the judicial inquiry of January 1993 found to be untrue. He resigned the next day, handing the country to Nyrup Rasmussen without an election. He sat in the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999. He said that the Danish welfare state was a Conservative achievement as much as anyone's. He died in Copenhagen in May 2021 at ninety-two, the last of the prime ministers who had known Stauning's Denmark.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
