Nadja Natalie Isaksen, the party’s immigration policy spokesperson, announced her departure on Sunday, telling local media that the party was not what she had “hoped for and fought for” and that she didn’t feel she had “the right conditions” to continue her political work within its ranks or to develop politically . Isaksen, who was previously only known for claiming that Danish-Afghan MP Samira Nawa from the centre-right Radical Left party was not truly Danish and postulating that there are genetic requirements to national identity, will have limited options for continuing her work in another of the tiny nation’s crowded field of extremist movements . All right-wing parties have ruled out the possibility of her joining them. Although the Danish political elite maintains a racist baseline, Isaksen’s open biological racism appears to be a step too far even for them .

When the party entered the tiny nation’s rubber-stamp parliament a little over a month ago, party leader Lars Boje Mathiesen gloated over the commentators and journalists who had dismissed the party as a “clown car” and didn’t think they had a chance. That triumphalism seems premature in retrospect.

Isaksen is the third of four MPs to abandon the party that entered parliament at the March 24 election. Jacob Harris was kicked out of the party after it was revealed that he and his wife had engaged in fraudulent practices regarding a now-bankrupt construction company, with a bankruptcy trustee recommending the couple for bankruptcy disqualification and police placing them under investigation for siphoning huge sums fun the company to spend on luxury consumption. As art of the candidate vetting process, Harris had signed a sworn statement declaring he was not involved in financial crime, which party leader Mathiesen displayed to the press before retreating to his office when confronted with uncomfortable questions .

Emilie Schytte left the party citing lack of leadership transparency and disaffection with Mathiesen’s absolutist leadership style, accusing the party of being “a pyramid scheme of hypocrisy and absolutism”. She also protested the overt racism of Rasmus Munch Søndergaard, the self-declared “race realist” who had written the party’s immigration policy and the sexism of party secretary Asher Garde who had claimed publicly that younger female MP’s had only been elected for their “sexual market value”. Schytte herself has come under scrutiny for lying on her CV, claiming she taught artificial intelligence at Roskilde University for two years when the institution confirmed she worked as a teaching assistant for just three months. Serious questions have also been raised whether she fulfills the residency requirements to be eligible to stand for election in the first place, given reports of her maintaining an apartment in Sweden, though authorities ultimately cleared her .

The loss of three out of four MPs is not the only bad story the embattled fascist party has seen since entering parliament, running on a platform of racism,  “drain the swamp”-style faux populism and grievances over car taxes. After the party was pressured to publish its previously secret bylaws in the wake of Schytte’s exit, it was revealed that party leader Lars Boje Mathiesen cannot be deposed for the next four years and receives the highest salary from his party out of all party leaders, an additional DKK 60,000 per month on top of his MP salary, bringing his annual compensation to over DKK 1.6 million .

This is Mathiesen’s third involvement in party politics that ends in chaos. He was previously kicked out of the now-defunct New Right party just a month after being elected party leader in February 2023 due to excessive demands for remuneration and attempts to transfer party funds to his personal accounts . Before that, as a local councillor in Aarhus, he stormed out of the far-right libertarian Liberal Alliance in anger after being passed over for a national nomination, complaining there was “no free competition” in the party.

Lars Boje Mathiesen is now the only MP for the Citizens’ Party. The clown car has turned into a unicycle.

Frederiksen has negotiated across the aisle with the centre-left since the election, but any broad coalition still requires Rasmussen’s blessing, which he seems unwilling to give. Talks were recently roiled by the 2006 “welfare agreement,” a controversial backroom deal between right-wing parties that continuously raises the retirement age. Frederiksen initially suggested it had “fallen” for technical reasons as Lars Løkke Rasmussens’s astroturfed “Moderate Party” was not a signatory to the agreement as it was founded as recently as 2022. This prompted fury from the Liberals and Conservatives, who openly leaked the development on Facebook and threatened to boycott talks. Frederiksen has since given Rasmussen an “unconditional assurance” that his party can join the agreement regardless of the outcome of the coalition talks, yet this concession has not broken the deadlock.

Rasmussen insists on reconstituting the previous term’s unpopular right-wing regime with the Social Democrats, Liberals, and his own Moderate Party with the addition of the Conservatives, and possibly the centre-right “Radical Left”. Last month this Frankenstein arrangement was effectively rejected by voters who returned a deeply fractured parliament with the only unifying message being discontent with the incumbent right-wing regime. Both the Liberals and Social Democrats suffered their worst election results in over a century, punished by an electorate that disliked the previous coalition. Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s Moderate’s also saw a setback.

The Social Democrats are in crisis. Their drift toward a national-conservative ideology convincing reactionary economics and virulent Islamophobia with strategic welfare provisions for select racially and ideologically “pure” demographics has alienated voters and rank-and-file members alike. The policy of being as racist as the fascists has only fuelled the troubled nation’s descent into sectarianism and has sent voters to the fascist Danish People’s Party, where they can get the real deal. Meanwhile, the Socialist People’s Party has surged on welfare issues abandoned by the Social Democrats.

The Liberals are similarly desperate, having delivered their worst-ever result; their base punished them for partnering with their traditional arch-nemesis, the Social Democrats. punished it for joining a coalition with the Social Democrats, its traditional arch-nemesis. Other, newer right-wing parties have been eating the Liberal Party’s lunch for years. If you are mad about taxes and believes the poor should be hunted for sport, you vote for the far-right Liberal Alliance. If you are a racist, you have a rich selection of ultra-nationalist extremists to vote for in one of three fascist parties: the Danish People’s Party, the Denmark Democrats, or the Citizens’ Party. If you are an enlightened centrist who fancies yourself to be the smartest adult in the room, you vote for the Lars Løkke Rasmussen party.

It has become increasingly difficult to see who the Liberal Party is for or why anyone would vote for them. The Liberals are in a death spiral and desperately need to reinvent themselves. If they get locked into the role of junior partners to the Social Democrats, it will only deepen their crisis.

The Conservatives may be pining for relevance, but they have eyes like everyone else. They can see what happened to the Liberals and would be wise not to repeat their mistake.

A coalition between Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the hard-right is not viable. The far right despises Rasmussen, and to scrape together the necessary parliamentary support, any such government would depend on three recent-intake MPs who were expelled from respectively the far-right Liberal Alliance and the fascist Citizens’ Party immediately after the election.

The only viable path is a broad coalition where Lars Løkke Rasmussen and the Social Democrats reaches across the aisle and works with the centre-left, yet Rasmussen refuses to negotiate in good faith with the left. His purported centrism extends only to the right. He has declared the Red-Green Alliance, a moderate pro-democracy opposition party, to be beyond the pale, clutching his pearls over their internal democratic governance structures that allow rank-and-file members influence on policy. Meanwhile the right-wing tabloid B.T. is running scare stories about the supposedly “radical” views of individual members of the Red-Green’s national executive committee; one had made statements in support of the Palestinian resistance movement PFLP in three past, another had stated in an interview many years ago that he could imagine a hypothetical situation in which armed struggle could be a legitimate form of political praxis while adding that the situation in Denmark was very far from such a scenario. Thus far, this has been the worst dirt they have been able to find.

The centre-left has handled this year’s coalition talks more firmly than in the past: the Socialist People’s Party demands full cabinet participation in any government they support, and the Red-Greens insist on a concrete one-year plan to reduce inequality. Neither will support a coalition including Liberals or Conservatives.

As the stalemate drags into its second month, new elections loom as a distant but increasingly likely escape valve. Rasmussen has threatened to withdraw support for Frederiksen as formateur and hand the role to Liberal leader Troels Lund Poulsen, a move that would do nothing to resolve the underlying issues. Unless Copenhagen’s fractured elite overcomes narrow factional interests, Denmark risks a protracted period of instability that could further erode public faith in its fragile democratic institutions.