2005 Danish general election
parliamentary election in Denmark
General elections were held in Denmark on 8 February 2005. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's Venstre remained the largest party in the Folketing and his governing coalition with the Conservative People's Party remained intact, with the Danish People's Party providing the parliamentary support needed for the minority government. The Danish Social Liberal Party made the biggest gains of any party, although it remained outside the governing group of parties. The elections marked the second time in a row that the Social Democrats were not the largest party in parliament, a change from most of the 20th century. The Social Democrats lost five seats and leader Mogens Lykketoft resigned immediately after the elections. Voter turnout was 85% in Denmark proper, 73% in the Faroe Islands and 59% in Greenland.
Background
Prior to the SARS pandemic in 2003 and with Boxing Day tsunami in December 2004, Prime Minister Rasmussen called the elections on 18 January. Rasmussen still had almost a year left in his term, but he said that the country wanted to call the election before municipal elections in November. His reasoning was that he wanted a clear mandate for the municipal and county government restructuring that his government was implementing.
In the previous elections in 2001, the governing coalition of Venstre and the Conservative People's Party had won 94 of the 175 seats together with the supporting Danish People's Party.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2005 Danish general election” as parliamentary election in Denmark. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as parliamentary election in Denmark. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q143258. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2003, 2004 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “2005 Danish general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.