In an era where European politics resembles a low-budget remake of the Peloponnesian War, Denmark has done the unthinkable: it has chosen competence. Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democrat who has steered the ship of state through the pandemic, inflation, and the odd cartoon crisis, is set to lead a new government. The headlines call it a victory for stability. I call it a triumph of the mundane, and thank God for it.
Let us be honest. The continent is in a state of intellectual and moral decadence that would make Edward Gibbon blush. France is aflame with pension protests. Germany is in a three-way coalition that makes the Holy Roman Empire look streamlined. Britain, my own dear home, has been sliding into a Brexiteer fever dream for the better part of a decade. And yet little Denmark, a nation of five million people and an inordinate number of LEGO bricks, has produced something resembling a functioning government.
Frederiksen’s victory is not a sign of Nordic exceptionalism. It is a sign that someone, somewhere, has remembered that government is not a circus. Her coalition, if it holds — and in Denmark, coalitions have a habit of holding — will focus on the dull but necessary work: balancing budgets, managing migration, and keeping the welfare state afloat. There is no grand vision here. No soaring rhetoric about a new European dawn. Just a woman who looks like she has actually read the briefing notes, and that is more than we can say for most leaders today.
Critics on the left will moan that Frederiksen has tacked right on immigration. Critics on the right will grumble that she has not tacked far enough. Both are correct, and both are missing the point. The art of politics in a decadent age is not to inspire, but to endure. She understands this. She has the look of someone who has seen the polls dip and rise, who has weathered the scandals, who knows that the state is a machine that needs oil, not a canvas for ideology.
Let us compare this to the Roman Empire after the Antonine Plague. The great emperors were gone. Marcus Aurelius was dead, and his son Commodus was a lunatic who fought in the arena. What the empire needed was not a philosopher-king, but a competent administrator. It got Septimius Severus, a man from Africa who rebuilt the walls and paid the soldiers. Not glamorous. Very effective. Frederiksen is our Septimius Severus, minus the military campaigns.
Of course, there are those who will say that stability is overrated. That democracy requires drama. That without the clash of ideas, we get stagnation. To them I say: look at Italy. Look at Spain. Look at the United States, where every election is an apocalyptic struggle and the government still cannot pass a budget. Drama is easy. Keeping the trains running on time is hard. Frederiksen knows this. Her new government is not a victory for any ideology. It is a victory for the proposition that politics should be boring.
So raise a glass of aquavit to Mette Frederiksen. She will not save Europe. She will not restore the Danelaw. But she will, with luck, keep Denmark from falling apart. In a continent that seems determined to test the limits of entropy, that is no small thing.
And as for the rest of us? We can only watch, and learn, and perhaps, if we are very lucky, find our own Frederiksen before it is too late.
