V - the Liberal Party started life as a peasant party opposed to the large countryside landowners. By the time parliament had acquired enough constitutional clout for them to matter, though, they were overtaken left-ward by the Social Democrats.

They played a relatively minor role in Danish politics, until the Conservatives disintegrated in the early nineties, when they became the leading rightist party. They have ruled since 2001, where they won the elections by imitating Tony Bliar which they've continued to do, right up to and including getting us involved in Vietraq.

They are a neo-liberal party. They want tax cuts. They also want to make sure that as few people as possible realize the implications of this fact. They like to appear centre-right, and in the name of realpolitik, that's how they act, at least as long as they think someone's looking. As far as I can tell, they are pretty much a bigger version of the Conservatives, but they manage to hide it better, through ruthless top-down management.

Think British Labour, except these guys used to be right-wing, so they're a deal scarier than Tony Bliar and his crowd.

K - the Conservative Popular Party our second-oldest party, they started life as a get-together of major landowners and industrialists to combat the radical leftist tendencies of the Liberal Party (V).

The Conservative Schlüter(1) held the position of PM in the 80'es, but ever since his successor Hans Engel had an - ah - inebriated, car-mediated encounter with a concrete roadside support element (in plain English, he was driving under the (heavy) influence and crashed his car. Very publicly), internecine strife has driven it into relative obscurity.

The Conservatives are the minor partner in the current coalition government. It's a bit hard to figure out what their policies are, other than the fact that they like tax cuts. Rather a lot, in fact. Oh, and they think criminals should be put in prison. A lot. And, of course, that private businesses should be allowed a freer hand to do basically whatever they want. Even put up surveillance cameras looking over public sidewalks. But mainly they just want some tax cuts. I.o.w., your classic conservative party.

S - the Social Democrats. Think the German SDU. They used to govern the country back in the 20th century, and did so skillfully, but a combination of lack of media savvy and a disastrous failure to anticipate the influence of the Danish Popular Party after 2001 forced them into opposition. They did not take kindly to that fact, and have been attempting variously, and largely unsuccessfully, to 'triangulate,' rediscover their 'core values' and trying to figure out what to do with themselves in the 21st century ever since.

Politically, they're centre-left. Precisely how much centre and how much left depends on who you ask. And when you ask them. They want increased public spending, but they also don't want to raise taxes. Something Will Have To Give. My guess is that when push comes to shove, they'll raise taxes, but at this point in time, a guess is all it can be.

DF - Danish Popular Party a protest party who got big in 2001, primarily by objecting to the relatively liberal immigration laws we had back then (and in no small part through the then-current government's disastrous media handling of them). They have been a loyal government-supporting party since then - so much, in fact, that most people count them as part of the government, even though officially they are not.

Their only really major quarrel with the rest of the government is that they don't want tax cuts if they can help it. And certainly not for the rich. I've written more about their policies elsewhere in this thread.

SF - Socialist Popular Party. Think the German Greens, except without the corruption and scandals. Used to be a classic socialist party, but have become increasingly social democratic over the years (to the point where they are currently more social democratic than the Social Democrats.

Policy-wise, they're a classic social-democratic party. Priorities include unemployment benefits, education, humane treatment of immigrants, sustainable energy, etc. Probably the spiritual home of most ET'ers.

NA - New Alliance the Tax Cut Party par excellence, their only really substantial political proposal so far is a flat tax of forty-ish percent. No word on where they're going to find the money. I have a bottle of beer that says it's going to be either public spending or Bushist Borrowing.

Other than that, their policies are borderline reasonable (mainly lifted from R, though).

R - the Social Liberal party traditionally a true centrist party, they have had few true agendas, mainly involving educational policy (I will leave it for another time whether those policies were good or not).

Their classical constituency was teachers, which very much shaped their outlook. Their narrow focus and relative disinterest in fiscal policy permitted them to sell their votes to the highest bidder, and the bids could get exceedingly high (they were part of both the last Schlüter government in the 80'es and the Nyrup (S) government in the 90'es).

Post-2001, though, they lost that position, because the current government has a stable majority with the Danish Popular Party. This caused them to take a turn to the left on 'values' questions, such as education and the treatment of foreigners, but - freed from
close co-operation with the Social Democrats that shaped them through the nineties, they have taken a distinctly rightwards turn on fiscal policy, advocating supply-side-ish taxation schemes.

KD - the Christian Popular Party (they style themselves Christian Democrats now, BTW, though I still refer to them by their old name). They're not going to make the 2 % cut, unless all the tea-leaf-readers are completely off this time.

I don't know much about their policies, other than the fact that they supported Schlüter, at least most of the time. They dropped their anti-abortion stance earlier this year (or late last year, can't recall), so I don't actually think that they have any policies left... Except that they don't like gay marriage and think that we shouldn't privatize the state church, and I'm not even sure about the last point.

CD - the Centre Democrats. They didn't even make it to the ballot this time, and frankly, good riddance. Another protest party started back when the TV was new and exciting and offered a new platform for politicians to use.

Their main agenda back then was to represent the new middle class (Villa, Volvo, Vovse(2)) and to combat undue left-wing bias in the state-sponsored Danish Broadcasting Service (and on the last score they actually had a point back then). To their credit, they realised that the latter point was becoming increasingly ludicrous after the TV monopoly was broken by TV2.

Like the Christian Popular Party, they were largely killed off by the mid-nineties, due to a combination of their charismatic founder dying and virtually every other party doing the Villa, Volvo, Vovse thing... They then began an increasingly contrived (and increasingly hopeless) series of PR stunts and rapid policy changes in order to find a new niche and avoid oblivion. They failed.

Ø - Unity List is a get-together of all the small communist parties whose acronyms used to take up more than half the letters in the alphabet.

Today they're your run-of-the-mill far-left party. Their members range from reasonable people you can actually have a discussion with, even though their agenda is somewhat radical, through anarchist crackpots to orthodox communists. The reasonable ones seem to be in the majority, though.

They recently hit a fairly major road bump by deciding to run an orthodox moslem (so orthodox, in fact, that she doesn't shake hands with men) far enough up the ballot that she might actually get elected. The Danish communists have traditionally been fairly skeptical of all things religious, so that by itself was sufficient to raise more than a few hackles.

It did not make things better that she went public with statements that suggested that she didn't categorically oppose the death penalty, Sharia law or attacks on Danish troops in Vietraq. Whether she's an actual fundie or just doing a good imitation of one is hard to judge, though, because the party leadership quickly gave her remedial 'media training,' which is newspeak for teaching her to lie and dissemble almost as well as the rest of our politicians.

M - Minority Party an aptly named party. I've yet to get the foggiest idea about what their policies are, other than the fact that they are a leftist party that was started in protest against the influence of the Danish Popular Party.

An Aside: The Conservatives are usually referred to as K, not KF, to avoid confusion with KD, who were formerly know as KF. The Social Democrats are usually denoted simply as S, and the Social Liberals as R.

(1)Conservative PM in the 80'es - closest thing to a Danish Ronald Reagan, but without Reagan's charm.

(2)House, Car, Doggie

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.