APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110016-6
Prime Minister from February 1968 to October 1971. The RLP draws its support from small and middle level businessmen and entrepreneurs, urban technicians, professionals, and intellectuals, and rural small landholders, the last element formerly their mainstay.
The Radical Liberals characterize themselves as the "social liberal" party, connoting support for strong state social programs existing alongside an essentially free, i.e. economically liberal economy. The goals of the party, according to a Danish authority, are:
- "...to realize the third possibility, the social-liberal society, where the state ensures freedom and order so that the economically strong cannot misuse their power to exploit the economically weaker and so that within this established framework, there is a place for personal initiative, without the state's rulers impeding sound enterprise."
Over the years, it has held a balance of power position between the Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Liberal/Conservative forces. By dint of its capacity to guarantee either side a parliamentary majority, either in a formal or informal alliance, the Radical Liberal Party had assumed a larger role in the political areas during its first 60 years than its small size would seem to have warranted.
The party came into being in 1905, when a wing opposing increased military expenditures broke away from the Moderate Liberal Party. The Radical Liberals soon found themselves more attuned to the Social Democratic Party, then a minority element, with the results that Radical Liberal governments of 1909-1910 won Socialist support. With the advent of a Social Democratic Prime Minister in 1924, the Radical Liberals returned the favor, thus inaugurating a lengthy period of Socialist/Radical Liberal governments. The two parties consistently found each other comfortable partners on domestic issues. They split badly over defense policy, however, when the Social Democrats jettisoned neutrality as a national guideline and took Denmark into NATO in 1949.
In something of a turnabout, Radical Liberals voted for the Defense Compromise Act of 1960, which confirmed Denmark's NATO membership, presumably in exchange for Social Democratic assurances that there would be no change in the policy of prohibiting the stationing of foreign troops and nuclear weapons on Danish soil in peacetime. This seeming ambivalence was also attributable to differences between the generally moderate leadership of the party and activist rank-and-file radicals - differences which have given the Radical Liberals the reputation of being one of the most querulous, if not divided, parties in parliament.
In an apparent effort to smooth other factional differences, the party during the 1968 election campaign avoided taking a stand on the NATO question and instead took the line that Denmark should work for a European security arrangement that would make both NATO and the Warsaw Pact superfluous. It called for a referendum on continued Danish membership in NATO after 1969 and went on record as favoring a revision of the Danish defense establishment, so as to reduce its size and alter its orientation in favor of a UN military contingent. By 1973, however, in the interest of continued cooperation with the Conservatives and Moderate Liberals, it joined those two parties and the Social Democrats to work out a new NATO defense package. In return for the support of the left, the staunchly pro-NATO Conservatives and Moderate Liberals had to concur in the maintenance of minimal force levels and the continued ban on the stationing of foreign troops or the locating of nuclear weapons in Denmark. Thus, much as in 1960, the same four parties, representing 90% of the parliamentary seats, reached a working compromise on continued NATO adherence.
The appeal of the Radical Liberal platform and the political organizing skills of its Folketing chairman (hence party leader), Hilmar Baunsgaard, enabled the party to double its constituency an representation in the Folketing in the 1968 election. In the post-election maneuvering, Baunsgaard succeeded to the Prime Ministry and assumed the direction of a Radical Liberal/Moderate Liberal/Conservative government. Baunsgaard recommended himself to his party and to the more numerous Conservatives and Moderate Liberals by reason of his strong leadership image, his intelligence, his charm, and his facility in parliamentary debate. A moderate in his party, Baunsgaard has taken a more favorable attitude toward NATO than that of the radical/pacifist element of his party.
Their ambivalence on defense matters notwithstanding, the Radical Liberals remain forthrightly and unabashedly internationalist. They have supported the Danish commitment to the United Nations and the Council of Europe and have long urged close cooperation within the Nordic Council. Although divided over Danish accession to the EC, the party leadership supported the initiative, indeed marshalled much of the national support for the beleaguered Social Democratic government during the parliamentary debate and subsequent pre-referendum campaigning.
Money not expended on defense is money available for broadly based social welfare programs, according
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110016-6
