Alternativet leader: We stand stronger than ever

When Alternative’s members gather on Saturday and Sunday for the party’s national meeting in Odense, it is a special one of its kind.

This year the party can celebrate its 10th anniversary. And the Alternative can even do that as a parliamentary party. It was exactly against the predictions leading up to the general election on 1 November last year.

– We stand on a stronger foundation now than I have ever experienced before, says political leader Franciska Rosenkilde before the national meeting.

The alternative was declared by virtually all political opinion makers as a party on its way to the end station, when four of the party’s then five members of parliament left the party in March 2020.

Party founder Uffe Elbæk was among those who said goodbye in protest against the then newly elected political leader, Josephine Fock.

With Torsten Gejl as a one-man army in the Folketing and from 2021 Franciska Rosenkilde as political leader, Alternativet was long on an apparently safe exit from the Folketing.

Right up until October last year, the party was every single time below the threshold of two percent for the Folketing in the opinion polls that the analysis institute Voxmeter prepares for Ritzau.

But on election day itself, 1 November, 3.3 percent supported the Alternative. The party thus went one mandate to six mandates in relation to the 2019 election.

Franciska Rosenkilde believes that the party has become both more “serious” and “mature”.

It has been necessary because “the problems that we have stated have only gotten worse”.

In its time, the alternative was primarily known as a green party, which was the first to launch an objective that Denmark should reduce its emission of greenhouse gases by 70 percent in 2030 compared to the level in 1990.

That ambition was later written into the Climate Act, which enjoys broad support in the Danish Parliament.

From the start, however, the party also settled on other notable proposals. Including the idea of ​​introducing a working week of 30 hours.

Franciska Rosenkilde assesses that the formation of the SVM government in December and the subsequent many cross-cutting alliances in the opposition have led to a “break with this very ideological political struggle”.

– In one way or another, it has created a space for people to be a little more open to the fact that anything can happen.

– That the Alternative suddenly comes up with an offer for a sustainable society is not quite as crazy as when red was red and blue was blue, she says.

/ritzau/