Valg meaning choice is related to two other words in Danish: the verb at vælge (to choose) and vilje (the noun of want, similar to will in English).
Elections consist of choosing a candidate, so it’s natural that the word evolved to refer to these, too.
It has the same meaning in Norwegian (val), Swedish (val) and German (Wahl).
In Denmark, elections to the parliament, as well as municipal and regional councils, take place every four years. A general election or folketingsvalg must take place once every four years, according to the Danish Constitution. Regional and local elections last took place in November 2025, and the next general (parliamentary) election is coming up on Tuesday March 24th, 2026.
Snap elections are also possible, but these are termed lynvalg, literally "lightning elections" and are held before the legally-required four-year parliamentary term has expired.
Denmark is a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarchy.
Essentially, this means that the head of state is a monarch rather than a president, so there are no presidential elections, only parliamentary elections. The head of state is King Frederik X, who is not elected.
Neither do Danes vote specifically for a prime minister or statsminister.
The election decides the distribution of parliament’s 179 seats or mandates, mandater. Therefore, any party or group of parties (in practice it is always a group of parties working together) can win if it claims 90 or more mandates, giving it a majority.
The winning party leader then becomes kongelig undersøger, a title which translates to the intriguing-sounding "royal investigator", but which means the member of parliament responsible for forming a government. If they do this successfully, they become prime minister.
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Parties running in the election must receive an overall vote share of at least 2 percent of the total number of votes cast to qualify for representation in parliament. After this, the mandates are distributed via a form of proportional representation termed forholdstalsmetoden in Danish.
The method gives each party the number of seats in parliament that corresponds to their vote share.
Unlike in British elections, however, Danish valgkredse or constituencies do not have one candidate running from each party. Instead, parties can put up several candidates in the same valgkreds, and voters can either pick their preferred candidate or just vote for the liste, meaning they give a general vote to a party.
The model for distribution of mandates is complex, using a system in which candidates can be elected through two types of mandate: a kredsmandat or a tillægsmandat (“constituency mandate” or “additional mandate”).
There are 135 kredsmandater. These are awarded based purely on local results: the candidate with most votes in a constituency gets that constituency’s seat or kredsmandat.
The 40 tillægsmandater are based on the vote share a party gets nationally and are designed to give parliament an equal reflection of the national vote split.
For example, if a party gets 20 percent of the national votes, it gets 20 percent of the additional mandates (the additional mandate allocations are in fact broken down into three regions, but we’ll leave this out for simplicity).
Candidates with a good number of personal votes, but who didn’t win the election locally, can therefore be elected on a tillægsmandat.
Once elected, there is no differentiation between the type of mandate through which a member of parliament got their seat – neither has superiority over the other.
Example sentences:
Over 4,3 millioner mennesker kan stemme ved folketingsvalget.
More than 4.3 million people can vote in the general election.
With a week to go until the election, the red bloc is ahead of the blue bloc, but the Moderate party has the decisive seats.
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