It wasn’t about Greenland.
Or Trump.
Or NATO.
It was about drinking water, taxes and pigs.
In the end, Denmark’s election held on Tuesday turned on everyday issues, which is partly why the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, earned a lackluster result, leaving her shaking the bushes on Wednesday to find enough support to build a coalition government to lead this Scandinavian country of six million.
Ms. Frederiksen, 48, soared for a moment in January as a hero for standing up to President Trump and blocking him from taking over Greenland, a gigantic Arctic island that has been part of the Danish kingdom for more than 300 years. She called in backup from NATO allies, and the Danish military even laid plans to blow up airfields to block any American invasion.
Her handling of the Greenland crisis and the praise she earned across Denmark is a big reason she called snap elections last month and tried to rush voters into giving her a third term.
But according to interviews with ordinary Danes and political experts, voters weren’t thinking much about Greenland as they headed to the polls. Instead, they were driven by more parochial interests, and in Denmark’s fractured political landscape, they had 12 parties to choose from.
Experts also said that many voters had grown tired of Ms. Frederiksen, who has been a force in Danish politics for more than 20 years. In some ways, her incumbency counted against her.
The result was that Ms. Frederiksen’s center-left party, the Social Democrats, won only 22 percent of the vote, the best of any party but its worst showing in a century. That left her on Wednesday submitting her resignation to King Frederik X, a formality because her government did not win a majority in Parliament.
After that, she appeared in a televised debate with leaders of the other parties. She won enough support to become the “royal investigator,” which gives her first crack at forming a government and reporting back to the king.
She’s expected to team up with left-wing politicians such as Pia Olsen Dyhr, leader of the Green Left, which came in second. Ms. Frederiksen’s plan, analysts said, is to then rustle up enough centrist support to get to a majority.
But there are still a lot of issues that divide Denmark’s parties.
One of them is the enormous swine industry. Denmark has twice as many pigs — 12 million — as people, one of the world’s highest concentrations of pigs per person.
Environmentalists in Denmark and their political allies blame pig farmers (and other farmers) for a high level of nitrates in the soil and possible contamination of drinking water. Ms. Frederiksen aligned herself with the left on this issue, which earned her the ire of many farmers.
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Many of these farmers are wealthy, and they don’t like Ms. Frederiksen’s embrace of a potential wealth tax, either. Some of the moderate parties campaigned against this tax, which could now make negotiations with them more complicated.
“The election campaign has been very, very domestic,” said Kasper Moller Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen. “We’re talking about drinking water, the number of pigs in the country, how many pigs we should produce and retirement age and taxation.”
At first glance, any coalition seems unwieldy. Denmark’s system has been steadily fragmenting over the past decade, with new, smaller parties vying for seats in Parliament, drawing away votes from the traditional parties.
“Atomization is the very clear trend,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels.
“But, fundamentally, the irony is that on most of the big things in society — even the big foreign policy issues — all these parties more or less agree,” he added. “So they end up fighting over provincial things.”
Experts said this is happening across Europe, where special-interest parties are pulling support away from mainstream establishment parties and fracturing the political landscape.
In Belgium and Holland, for instance, more than a dozen parties are represented in their governing bodies. In Britain, a strong right-wing party, Reform UK, has been boosted in recent months by defections from the Tories.
But the right-left power dynamic in Denmark hasn’t changed significantly, which is why Ms. Frederiksen still has the best chance to lead the government.
Denmark is a place where many people support high taxes and a big state. That was reflected on Tuesday, when parties on the left won more seats than parties on the right. But it was clear that Ms. Frederiksen herself had lost a bit of her mojo.
“She’s very unpopular,” Dr. Kirkegaard said.
He said that the same characteristics that played so well on the international stage, such as being steadfast, forceful and outspoken, didn’t play so well at home.
“Domestically, she’s viewed as a bully and essentially arrogant,” he said.
“She was kind of hoping that Greenland would take focus away from that,” he added. “But, fundamentally, because there are no pressing problems, this was an election that was really a very provincial election, actually, really fought on very narrow, local issues.”
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
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