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On December 4, 1973, the atmosphere in Folkets Hus (now Vega) in Rejsbygade in Vesterbro was intense as the Social Democrats and the rest of the political parties watched the election results roll in from across the country. When the final counts were complete, the Danish Parliament consisted of twice as many political parties as the day before, and the extreme wings of Danish politics were suddenly stronger than ever before.
By Katrine Madsbjerg and Hans Uwe Petersen | 04.12.2013
The 1973 general election has since become known as the landslide election – the election in which the protest parties got lots of votes and where voters for the first time abandoned the traditional four big old parties (Social Democratic Party, Liberal Party, Conservative Party and the Social Liberal Party) in a big way.
The Progress Party, founded by Mogens Glistrup in 1972, and former Social Democrat Erhard Jakobsen’s Centrum-Demokraterne swept in with 28 and 14 seats respectively. In addition to the election’s two new big vote-getters, the Danish Communist Party, the Justice League and the Christian People’s Party also came in, albeit with more moderate numbers (DKP got 6, the Justice League 5 and the Christian People’s Party 7).
The election was the third in 5 years, and the period up to 1982 was characterized by frequent parliamentary elections, followed by weak minority governments. The entire decade was characterized by the oil crisis, economic recession, joining the EC in 1972 and the associated struggles for and against. The political polarization after the 1968 youth uprising took hold, and the period was also marked by an unstable labor market with many “wildcat strikes”.
We have gathered some of the material from the 1973 election campaign in the collections of the Labor Museum & Library and Archive of the Labor Movement.
Our librarian has also indexed relevant entries in our library database, so you can now search for ‘Jordskredsvalget’ as a keyword.
The archive also contains correspondence between the Social Democratic Party and the Progress Party. You can see this here.
