1945-1950

Post-war dilemmas

During the months following the liberation, the leaderships of the Social Democratic Party and the DKP discussed the possibility of merging the two parties, something for which there were strong wishes among workers; however the distrust and great distance which existed between the two leaderships were too pronounced to permit the realisation of political unity. During that particular time there was no overwhelming differences in terms of programmatic stance as the social democrats had just prepared a new manifesto which - worded in a fairly radical terminology - built on the experience gained during the years between the wars; it called for full employment, social security, efficiency and democracy in trade and industry. These demands required a planned economy, and thus an extension of social regulation and control. In reality it came to function as a reform programme with the welfare state as its objective and a capitalism free of any recessions as a precondition.

1945-46 saw a number of large-scale rallies and strikes, but despite the fact that there was a great deal of correspondence between the demands made at such rallies and those propounded by the LO, they turned out to have very little impact. After all, the labour parties had been weakened in comparison with their pre-war election results, and the pronounced militancy among some workers led nowhere.

At the next general election, the DKP lost approximately half of the votes it had gained at the previous election, votes that were won by the social democrats. It must be assumed that many of the votes cast in favour of the communists in October 1945 now fell to the social democrats because voters saw no other way than voting social democrat to topple the non-socialist government. This having been accomplished, a social democratic government took office in 1947, which, however, fell in 1950. The next three years saw a non-socialist government, which succeeded in pushing through the revision of the Constitution for which the social democrats had worked so hard. From 1953 to 1968 all the governments were under social democratic leadership, although they were always coalition governments with non-socialist parties participating, and frequently they were minority governments. In other words, the Social Democratic Party bore the main responsibility for the economic and political developments during those years.

In 1949 Denmark joined NATO and gradually every idea of introducing a planned economy was scrapped, existing regulatory control systems were wound up, and the country was enrolled in the American dominated capitalist system. This was also a result of Denmark having joined the OECD, with all the consequences this entailed for economic policies. In 1960 the next logical step was for Denmark to enter into the free trade agree­ment of EFTA.