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Leader of far-right Danish party to step down and quit politics

Pernille Vermund, leader of the far-right Nye Borgerlige (New Right) party, has announced her intention to step down from the role this year and quit politics after the next general election.

Leader of far-right Danish party to step down and quit politics
Far-right Danish party Nye Borgerlige must find a new leader after Pernille Vermund said she was stepping down. File photo: Emil Helms/Ritzau Scanpix

Vermund announced her decision on the party’s website on Tuesday and said that a new leader should be found as soon as possible.

“The torch must now be carried onwards,” she wrote.

“I have therefore informed our members, our parliamentary group and our excellent staff that this will be my last period in parliament – and that I recommend Nye Borgerlige’s members to choose a new chairman straight away to lead the party in the electoral period that is now really getting underway,” she said.

“That means I am leader of Nye Borgerlige until the party’s annual congress or extraordinary congress, if the leadership decides to call one,” she said.

Vermund is an architect by profession and former local politician with the Conservative party. She has been an MP since the 2019 election, when she led Nye Borgerlige, which she co-founded in 2015, into parliament for the first time.

She was reelected to parliament in November 2022 as the far-right group had a solid if unspectacular second election, increasing its vote share from 2.4 percent to 3.7 percent.

She has previously said she did not plan to spend more than two electoral periods as a lawmaker.

The far-right party can be considered broadly libertarian on social and economic issues and vehemently opposed to immigration, particularly from countries with Muslim populations.

READ ALSO: Far-right politician appointed chair of Danish citizenship committee

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SYRIA

Danish government split over repatriation of women and children from Syria

Only one of the three parties in Denmark’s coalition government has stated it wants to repatriate women with national connections to Denmark from Kurdish-run prison camps in Syria.

Danish government split over repatriation of women and children from Syria

The Moderate party, one of the junior parties in the coalition, wants Danish children to be repatriated from the al-Roj prison camp in northern Syria, even if it means their mothers are evacuated with them.

The other two parties, the Social Democrats and Liberals (Venstre), still oppose bringing the women back to Denmark.

The two latter parties have stated that they only want to evacuate the children and not the mothers, who are in the camps because they have been sympathisers of the Islamic State (Isis) terror group or spouses of Isis militants.

As such, the government is split over the question of whether to retrieve the five children and three mothers from the camp, where they have now been marooned for several years.

Human rights organisations have in the past expressed concerns over the conditions at the prison camps and Denmark has faced criticism for not evacuating children there who have connections to Denmark.

READ ALSO:

Current government policy does not evacuate children from the two camps without their mothers and will not evacuate mothers if their Danish citizenship has been revoked.

A recent headline case saw a mother from the camp win an appeal against a Danish immigration ministry decision to revoke her citizenship, meaning she now has the right to be evacuated. She was expected to be prosecuted by Denmark under terrorism laws on her return to the country.

Denmark’s Scandinavian neighbour Norway on Wednesday repatriated two sisters who went to Syria as teenagers as well as their three children, citing abysmal conditions in the camp where they were housed.

Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, leader of the Moderate party, said at a parliamentary committee hearing on Wednesday that the government will state its agreed position on the issue “soon”, news wire Ritzau reports.

“The government will make a decision on the government’s position on the basis of the updated government policy position. And I expect we will do that soon,” he said.

Rasmussen said in January that the government had asked the relevant authorities to provide up-to-date information related to the Danish children who remain in the camps.

That information is expected to form the “policy position” (beslutningsgrundlag) referred to by Rasmussen in his committee comments.

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