And to return to normality for a while...
I've been watching Matador again, and with that in mind I've decided to take another look at Danish interwar politics. I've already done
the 1918 election, so I'm going to be continuing from there.
The Zahle ministry, having been comfortably re-elected in 1918, looked on the end of the First World War with confidence. Now, they hoped, the privations and compromises of wartime governance would end, and the left would be able to see their reform ambitions through. Events would overtake them before they got the chance, although they were able to get yet another new electoral law passed (more on which later).
One of the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles said that Germany would submit to plebiscites to decide the future status of several of its border regions, and even though Denmark had been neutral throughout the war, one of those border regions was Schleswig, which still had a substantial Danish minority and was the target of substantial Danish revanchism following the 1864 cession. The Allies asked the Danish government for input on the borders of the plebiscite zone, which eventually led to the creation of two zones: Zone I covered three and a half large, rural, mostly Danish-speaking districts, while Zone II covered a strip of land to the south of it alongside the city of Flensburg, which had been one of Denmark's most important port cities before 1864 and formed the target for a lot of the most intense revanchist sentiment. However, while Zone I was expected to vote comfortably for reunification with Denmark, Zone II was almost entirely German-speaking and pro-German. In the original border proposal from the 1890s that the Danish government drew on, it had been intended as the maximum border that could feasibly be assimilated, and the author of that proposal later withdrew his support for annexing it as he became convinced Flensburg was too German to accept Danish rule. Nevertheless, opinion in Denmark demanded its inclusion, and the Allies had no problem with potentially weakening Germany even further, so in it went.
The plebiscites were scheduled for February and March 1920, and followed slightly different rules. Zone I, which voted first, would vote on its future allegiance as a single unit. If half-plus-one of its inhabitants voted to unify with Denmark, the entire zone would be ceded. This was to ensure that the German-speaking populations of the border towns, many of whom had moved there since 1864 (especially so in Sønderborg, which had a German naval base), would be drowned out by the solidly-Danish countryside. For Zone II, however, each town and parish would decide its own allegiance, and the French-led international commission which oversaw the plebiscites would draw a new border based on the local results. In the end, though, only three villages in Zone II voted for Denmark, all of them on the island of Föhr well south of the line, and so the commission's border was essentially identical to the Zone I border.
Zahle and his ministry accepted these results enthusiastically, but almost no one else in Denmark did. Most opposition politicians felt that Denmark had a right to take back Zone II as well, as all of Schleswig had once been Danish soil and, in their minds, remained Denmark's birthright. They had seen Zahle pursue a weak-kneed policy of accommodation towards the people who had stolen Danish lands all through the war, and now it seemed as though they had final proof that the Prime Minister would never be able to guard Denmark's national interest properly. The fact that the zone had voted for Germany by over 80%, they saw as a result of German repression of Danish feeling, and to remedy this they called for a League of Nations mandate to be created, which would eventually be allowed to vote on its future allegiance once a fair vote could be assured. This was not of interest to Zahle, who wanted the question settled as fast as possible so that he could return to domestic reforms - an attitude which only strengthened his opponents' conviction that he was secretly pro-German.
This attitude was shared by King Christian X, who did not, however, support the idea of a League of Nations mandate. He wanted Flensburg and Zone II to be ceded forthwith. After some minimal prodding by business leaders in Copenhagen, he decided to summon Zahle and ask him to dissolve the Folketing. Zahle refused to do this before his new electoral law could pass, knowing full well that the 1918 electoral law benefitted Venstre and would make it harder for him to win re-election. There was now an impasse - Zahle reminded the King that he still had the confidence of the lower house, but also noted that the 1915 constitution technically left the appointment and dismissal of the Prime Minister to royal prerogative. The King decided to take him at his word and immediately dismissed him, declaring that if his Prime Minister would not see to the national interest, he would simply appoint someone who would. His choice was Otto Liebe, a lawyer and businessman who had never previously been involved in party politics, but was known to be a right-wing nationalist by persuasion.
Reactions from the left were immediate and violent. The newspaper
Social-Demokraten, owned by the trade unions, ran the headline "The King makes a coup d'état", and the leadership of the unions and the Social Democratic Party drafted an ultimatum that called on the King to restore Zahle to power or else they'd launch a general strike. The next few days saw massive demonstrations in Copenhagen, and although the Folketing were on leave for Holy Week, the Copenhagen City Council (which had a Social Democratic majority) met and drafted a resolution of no confidence in the Liebe ministry. Faced with the threat of an uprising in the capital, the King was left no choice but to call in the leading figures of all four parliamentary parties and hammer out a solution to the crisis. A new election would be held in three weeks' time, as the King had originally wanted, but it would follow the new draft electoral law, and Liebe's ministry would be dismissed immediately, to be replaced by a caretaker government that would sit until the election was decided.
The 1920 electoral law was quite interesting, not least because it would last for almost thirty years, and its basic principles remain in use to this very day. Essentially, it was an attempt to merge full nationwide proportionality with local representation, which remains something of a holy grail of electoral mathematics even now - for 1920, it did remarkably well at it, although it wasn't without some oddities around the edges. Basically, it was a more proportional version of the 1918 system. The counties would be assured the same number of seats as they'd had in 1918, on top of which (like in 1918) a number of additional seats were elected to ensure proportionality within each region (
landsdel). Again like in 1918, candidates were nominated in single-member constituencies, but unlike in 1918, the results in the single-member constituencies would not govern seat distribution among the parties. Instead, seats were distributed proportionally within each county (or in Copenhagen, within each of the three roughly equal six-seat constituencies) and awarded to the most successful constituency candidates from each party. The voters had the option of voting for any of the candidates within their county, or simply to vote for a party, which would be counted for the candidate in their local constituency. If you're confused by this, you're not alone, but it worked quite well all things considered. The national parties appreciated the high degree of proportionality, while local parties appreciated being able to nominate their own local candidates in a more direct way than a pure list election would allow. As mentioned, there'd be some tweaks around the edges in decades to come, but by and large this is still how the Danish electoral system works today.
The results of the election were a huge disappointment for Zahle and his allies. In spite of the blatantly undemocratic actions of the King in dismissing his ministry, the people seemed to care more about national honour than they did democratic norms - on top of which Zahle's ministry was already hugely unpopular for unrelated reasons mainly to do with the wartime economy. The
Business Party (
Erhvervspartiet), a protest movement of small business owners in the cities who wanted to ensure a lighter government hand in the economy, won four seats, and Zahle's own Radical Party was almost halved in size compared to 1918. Far from artificially strengthening Venstre, the 1918 electoral system had most likely propped up the Radicals - they'd been in an electoral alliance with the Social Democrats for several elections running, but with the proportional system introduced, the latter no longer saw the need to prop up "bourgeois" candidates, and the result was clear. Zahle held his own seat in Ringsted, a railway town that would most likely have been otherwise inclined towards social democracy, but only a handful of Radical constituency candidates were successful beside him, and the party relied on the additional regional seats to reach any sort of success.
The new Folketing had a clear right-wing majority, and the King called Venstre leader Niels Neergaard to form a new government. For reasons unclear to me, this only lasted a couple of months before new elections were held, and then yet another set of elections followed in September with the Schleswig reunification completed. 1920, for Denmark, was a year of three elections, though none of the others would yield anywhere near as many surprises as the April ones.