Today‘s media landscape is awful. Headlines made similar claims about elections in Germany earlier this year. It was especially bad about the state elections in North-Rhine Westphalia where virtually every headline claimed a huge victory for the far right but in reality they didn‘t win a single district and didn‘t get a single mayor candidate elected. In terms of actually gaining control it was an absolute disaster. A major failure for the far right. A party with 15%-20% of the votes being so powerless is frankly unprecedented.

Also sounds like these were just municipal elections, or am I reading that incorrectly?

Thank you for the additional context :)

Unfortunately it’s true. A lot of voters in Copenhagen moved further left, but for the entire country it seems that the Social Democratic Party lost voters in both directions, giving the mayor titles to the right wing coalitions. The small populistic parties gobble up the votes and point them to the Mayor candidates from the Liberal Party (which is right wing). The population as a whole appears to move to the right.

On the bright side, municipal level elections like this are in no way comparable to the usual party politics of national elections. There’s much more collaborating across party lines and much larger internal differences in the parties due to the local situations that they deal with. The personal votes are more important than the party. The small populistic parties don’t get much say in the end, when they only have their own members to represent them in the city councils. Most decisions will still only be possible as collaboration between the largest parties from both sides of the middle.