Roundup: Danish general elections set for June 18

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt on Wednesday announced the next general election in Denmark would take place on June 18, kick-starting electoral campaigns for three weeks.

Although polls show that the opposition parties bloc is ahead of the governing parties, led by Thorning-Schmidt's Social Democratic Party, it is too early to assert who will govern the small Scandinavia country for the next four years.

On the one hand, austerity measures and the controversial structural reforms ushered in by the incumbent government have incurred widespread complaints among voters, many of whom accuse the government of not delivering what it promised at the last election.

Over the past years, a surge of reforms has swept over Denmark, starting with a reform of elementary schools, and a reform of the pensions for the elderly and disabled. A reform of unemployment insurance has been particularly painful, as thousands of unemployed in Denmark lost their unemployment insurance and were left with low public welfare payments as a result.

On the other hand, the overall political timing is good for Thorning-Schmidt, who recently announced that Denmark has moved out of the shadow of the financial crisis that had swept across the nation since 2008.

The current government has been in power after it was constituted on the heights of the economic crises in 2011. It can take the credit of leading Denmark through the economic crisis, imposing bold structural and economic reforms.

"We lost 5 percent of our prosperity during the financial crises. I have from the first day as prime minister had one clear goal - to bring Denmark out of the crisis with our solidarity and growth intact. Denmark is now back on track, we are out of the crisis," Thorning-Schmidt told a press conference on Wednesday.

The election was announced a day after the government published a budget plan to release 39 billion Danish kroner (5.7 billion U.S. dollars) over the next five years on improving care for the elderly and the ill, investing more on education and public research in green technologies.

This move is seen by many as a government effort to improve its popularity after years of budget cuts.

Thorning-Schmidt faces a tough challenge from the opposition liberal right, led by former prime minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen.

In spite of improving poll ratings for the Social Democratic government during the past few months, most national polls indicate a narrow majority for the liberal right.

For the next 22 days, carefully prepared election campaigns will be rolled out for one of the most unpredictable elections in Denmark for many years. Topics like immigration, the size of the public sector, health and unemployment benefits are expected to dominate the election campaigns.

The Danish political landscape is likely to change, and several new political parties are expected to pass the threshold and make it to parliament, making it harder to predict the parliamentary situation after the election.

A new political party, "Alternativet," led by former minister of culture Uffe Elbaek, is predicted to get more than 2 percent of the votes, making it likely for the party to get seats in parliament. Endit