COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark’s former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen plans to form a new political party to connect left and right wings with a “pragmatic and undogmatic” voice, a move that could potentially upset the nation’s post-war political order.
Rasmussen resigned from his centre-right Liberal Party in January after losing the 2019 election to the Social Democratic Party and being dethroned as head of his party the same year.
“There will be a NEW party with the ambition to become a sensible, pragmatic and undogmatic voice in the political debate,” Rasmussen wrote in Danish tabloid B.T. on Sunday.
Danish politics have been dominated by the centre-left Social Demokratiet and the centre-right Venstre since the end of World War II. Rasmussen’s party sets its sights on a position between the two, potentially upsetting the 80-year-old order of things.
The move comes after Rasmussen, 56, in the lead-up to the 2019 general election campaigned to form a centre coalition government with the Social Democratic Party in order to circumvent more extremist political views on both wings, albeit without success.
He said he hopes his new party, which is yet to be named, can “create momentum and change at a crossroads between the right wing that is tormented by value-based politics and the left wing that is stuck in an outdated view of the individual and the state.”
More specifically, he said he aims to lower company taxes, increase the quality in the public welfare services and improve the lives of the weakest in our society.
Rasmussen served as prime minister from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2015 to 2019.
(Reporting by Tim Barsoe)
