Danes voted Thursday in an election that was too close to call, after an intense three-week campaign focused on immigration and the economy. "I'm asking people to vote for certainty and they know what they get with me. They get a stable economy and they get good welfare," Social Democratic Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said as she arrived outside a Copenhagen polling station with husband Stephen Kinnock, a British Labour MP.
The campaign has been dominated by the economy and the future of the country's cherished cradle-to-grave welfare state, as well as immigration and the rising cost of hosting asylum seekers. Thorning-Schmidt, in power since 2011, and right-wing opposition leader Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who governed from 2009 to 2011, have both claimed credit for a resurgent economy and tried to woo voters with pledges to curb immigration. Politicians campaigned until the last minute, with 20 percent of voters undecided and speculation that the outcome of the race could be decided in Denmark's two former colonies, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.