Danish PM calls snap election

After months of increasingly frantic speculations the Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has just announced that Parliament is being dissolved and that new elections will be held on 15 September.
The current government has been in power since 2001, although Lars Løkke Rasmussen has only been Prime Minister since 2009, when he succeeded Anders Fogh Rasmussen when the latter became Secretary General of NATO. Løkke’s government is a coalition of his own Liberal Party and the small Conservative Party, but for a parliamentary majority it has been dependent on formal support agreements with the far-right wing Danish People’s Party, which has used their powerful position to force through much of their policies.
The opinion polls indicate that it might be tight race, but most of them show the government falling behind the opposition. Thus it seems most likely that the next Danish government will be a coalition between the Social Democrats, the Socialist People’s Party and the Danish Social Liberal Party, possibly dependent on the Red-Green Alliance for support. If so, the leader of the Social Democrats, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, will become Prime Minister (the country’s first female PM).
In any case it is to be hoped that Denmark will finally get a government which is not held hostage by an openly racist party which seems to consider human rights a four letter word.