COPENHAGEN — Danes began voting on Tuesday in general elections, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen seen as the favourite after standing up to US President Donald Trump over Greenland.

 

The latest polls give the left-wing bloc, for which Frederiksen is the self-proclaimed candidate, a nine-seat lead over the right-wing bloc, but neither side is projected to win a majority of the 179 seats in Denmark's parliament, the Folketing.

 

Frederiksen, a Social Democrat who has been in office since 2019, has been praised for her leadership after fending off Trump's repeated demands to annex Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory he claims the United States needs for national security reasons.

 

"The alternatives [to Mette Frederiksen] are worse," 24-year-old student Freja Strandlod told AFP after casting her vote in central Copenhagen, just after polls opened at 8:00 am (0700 GMT).

 

"People may not really like her, but they see her as the right leader," Elisabet Svane, political analyst at Danish newspaper Politiken, told AFP.

 

Frederiksen, who had "a prime minister you can count on" as one of her campaign slogans "is a unifying figure in a world full of insecurity, and Danes are quite anxious -- there's Greenland, Ukraine, (and mystery) drones" that flew over the Scandinavian country last year, Svane said.

 

The four overseas seats held by Denmark's two autonomous territories -- two for Greenland and two for the Faroe Islands -- could tip the balance if the election result is very close.

 

The centrist Moderate party, led by Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, a two-time former prime minister, could also prove decisive.

 

"I am not a candidate for prime minister, but I have said that I would very much like to take the lead in trying to create a basis for what a government might look like," Lokke Rasmussen told news agency Ritzau.