Happy Denmark casts an anxious vote

A handbook. The crime bestseller that brought Greenland centrestage. And ‘lykke’

Image by Daria Strategy, Unsplash

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The Big Story:

Denmark votes in a snap general election, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s ongoing war on Iran and with its own continuing nightmare about the US president’s designs on Greenland.

Surely all of this tension must be affecting the generally joyful nature of Denmark, consistently ranked in the top three on the World Happiness Report?¹

• The Danish prime minister has framed the vote as a “decisive election” as Danes seek to define their relationship with the US.
• The election could also endorse the government’s move to break with Denmark’s nearly 70-year-old policy prohibiting nuclear weapons on its soil, as well as bringing long-taboo nuclear power into its energy mix.

This Week’s Books:

• Why Danish politics matters…to everyone.
• A bestseller revolving around Denmark-Greenland links.
• The search for examples of happiness in different countries.

Another relevant free-to-read post: Europe debates its destiny — and Ukraine

The Oxford Handbook of Danish Politics

Edited by: Peter Munk Christiansen, Jørgen Elklit, Peter Nedergaard Publisher: Oxford University Press

Year: 2020

This scholarly book, by 50 experts, explains why the world should care about the particularities of politics in a small north European country of six million people.

Denmark is a reassuring example of making differences work, even in an age of political flux and shifting loyalties.

The book points out that Denmark specialises in minority governments and these have been able to run the ship of state in stable and orderly fashion for years, with Denmark’s economy among the strongest in Europe. Indeed the current Danishgovernment, led by Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen, spans the political spectrum by including the Liberals to the right and the Moderates, a centrist party.

Denmark is a famously tolerant and liberal society (its Jews were almost all saved during German occupation in WWII) but has recently been linked to incidents of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

By: Peter Høeg

Publisher: The Harvill Press

Year: 1993

When this interlinking of Denmark and Greenlandic lives appeared on the world literary map, it garnered extravagant praise and became a bestseller.

The story is intriguing. Copenhagen spinster Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, whose father is a Danish doctor and mother an Inuit Greenlander, investigates the death of a child next door. Isaiah, a six-year-old Greenlandic boy, had fallen to his death from a snow-covered roof and Miss Smilla senses foul play. It’s based mostly on her knowledge, as a Greenlandic Dane, of snow and ice formations.

The novel has a strong sense of the gross injustice of Denmark’s treatment of Greenland. Critics have said this book marked the debut on the international literary stage of Greenland, as a place whose sensibilities are material to the plot. That’s true. In 2026, I would also argue that Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow underlines another reality: Denmark and Greenland’s interconnectedness, with all its pleasures and pains.

Choice quotes:

Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what you’ve read is like explaining music in writing.

The flakes are the size of tiny feathers, and that’s the way snow is, it’s not necessarily cold.

The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World’s Happiest People

By: Meik Wiking

Publisher: Penguin

Year: 2017

This book, about “lessons of happiness from people around the world”, is by Meik Wiking, CEO and founder of the 13-year-old Copenhagen think tank the Happiness Research Institute.²

Lykke (pronounced loo-kah) is the Danish word for happiness and possibly one of the country’s most valuable cultural resources. Wiking notes Denmark’s place on “the World Happiness Reports commissioned by the United Nations” with this caveat: “But does this mean Denmark is a perfect society? No. do I think that Denmark provides relatively good conditions for its citizens to enjoy a relatively hig level of quality of life and happiness? Yes.”

Wiking offers some interesting behavioural science data as he sets out to find examples of happy people from around the world — Mexico, India, the UAE and elsewhere. He explores “the four-point happiness gap between the happiest and unhappiest countries” and assesses the six factors that explain it: “togetherness or sense of community; money; health; freedom; trust and kindness”.

Analysing the shared worldwide “joy of complaining”, he explains people’s tendency to zero in on the negative: “…it makes us sound smarter…prophets of doom and gloom appear wise and insightful”.

He ends with a quote from cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The Back Story:

• Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen called the March 24 general election seven months early.³
• Frederiksen, who has led Denmark since 2019, is seeking a third term and her grand coalition government was the first in more than 40 years to ​bridge the left-right divide.
• A sense of global uncertainty had been weighing on Danes in the run-up to the election. Pundits and players alike say that for the first time in modern Danish history, geopolitics has become the main lens through which voters will choose their leaders.⁴
• One of the many charming things about Denmark: In Copenhagen, traffic lights are coordinated to create a ‘Green Wave’, allowing cyclists to hit a series of green lights on the way to work because officials synchronise them so that riders can pass through intersections without stopping.

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¹ https://www.worldhappiness.report/

² https://www.happinessresearchinstitute.com/

³ Social Democrats are expected to stay in power, albeit with what some forecast as the party’s weakest results in a hundred years.

⁴ “We are in the middle of a geopolitical earthquake”: Soren Lippert, a former political adviser to Prime Minister Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, who went on to found GeoPolitik, a forum for political analysis, quoted by Bloomberg.