False Claims About Husband Hit Danish Conservative Chief in Poll
(Bloomberg) -- A Danish opposition leader is tripping up in an unusual scandal just ahead of a general election.
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Soren Pape Poulsen, the leading challenger to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, is hemorrhaging support after acknowledging that he made false claims about the origins of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Josue Medina Vasquez. The two are in the process of divorcing.
For years, Poulsen, leader of Denmark’s conservative party, claimed that his husband is Jewish and that he is the nephew of a former president of the Dominican Republic. Recent revelations in local media showed that Vasquez is neither of those, forcing Poulsen to acknowledge that he had given incorrect information to the public.
The controversy is hurting his chances of toppling Frederiksen’s Social Democratic government in national elections expected to be held soon. Poulsen has lost 4.4 percentage points in backing in the last two weeks, according to a Voxmeter poll published on Tuesday. The conservative leader had surged in polls to overtake the head of the Liberal Party, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, as the main contender to defeat Frederiksen, who has been forced to call elections no later than Oct. 4. The vote is usually held about three-to-four weeks after it’s called.
“His credibility has taken a hit,” Carina Saxlund Bischoff, an associate professor in political science at the Roskilde University, said in a phone interview. “The strange thing about this affair is that there seem to have been no personal gains to be made from saying these things that turned out to be untrue.”
In a Sept. 9 post on Facebook, Poulsen blamed his husband for saying “things that were wrong” and added that “other things have been based on misunderstandings.”
“I have, in good faith, passed on this information,” he said.
The center-right opposition bloc still has a slim majority over the Social Democrats and their allies as Frederiksen has had to deal with a scandal of her own. After riding a wave from steering the Danish economy through the pandemic and registering fewer fatalities than other nations, the government’s support has been waning. In July, Frederiksen received a reprimand for her role in a botched 2020 mink cull, which was triggered by Covid-19 contamination fears and later turned out to be illegal.
Poulsen is now working on changing the narrative and drawing attention back to his policy proposals, which include tax cuts and a cap on unemployment benefits. Frederiksen is campaigning on more welfare spending on hospitals and measures to fight the cost-of-living problems caused by inflation.
While the Conservatives, along with the Liberal Party and four other allies in parliament would command a majority, only 31% of voters pick Poulsen as the best candidate for prime minister, compared with 35% two weeks ago, according to the Voxmeter poll. Ellemann-Jensen of the Liberal Party has the backing of 19% of the voters while Frederiksen has 50%.
“It will be difficult for Poulsen to attack the prime minister’s credibility during the election campaign,” Bischoff said. “And that had seemed to be his tactic before this was revealed.”
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