Mogens Glistrup

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Mogens Glistrup (born May 28, 1926 in Rønne on Bornholm ; † July 1, 2008 in Virum / Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality ) was a Danish politician and founder of the Progress Party . He represented them from 1973 to 1983 and again from 1987 to 1990 as a member of the Folketing .

Life

Mogens Glistrup was the son of the high school teacher Lars Glistrup and his wife Ester, née Jensen. In 1950 he married Lene Svendsen (1925–2013). The couple had four children together.

Glistrup studied law at the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley . In the state law examination he achieved the third-best result in the history of Denmark. In 1955 he was admitted to the bar at the Regional Court and the Supreme Court . From 1956 to 1963 he worked as a lecturer in tax law at the University of Copenhagen.

Provocateur and tax rebel

Mogens Glistrup first caused a sensation on January 30, 1971 when he declared paying taxes to be immoral on a live broadcast on Danish television. Tax evaders, on the other hand, would act just as patriotically as the railroad saboteurs during the German occupation in World War II. He presented his tax accounts with a wage tax rate of zero percent. After this performance, several parties tried to win Glistrup for a parliamentary candidacy. It was first put on the Conservative Party list , but the decision was reversed shortly thereafter.

Glistrup's entertaining and radical proposals included abolishing the Danish military and replacing it with an answering machine that would say “we surrender” in all world languages. That saves money and, in an emergency, lives because Denmark is not defensible anyway.

Glistrup founded the Progressive Party (Frp) on August 22, 1972 in the Grøften restaurant in Tivoli in Copenhagen . The main concerns were the limitation of income tax, the reduction of state bureaucracy and the simplification of the legislative process. With this program, his party became the second largest parliamentary group in the Danish parliament after the so-called landslide election in 1973 and received 28 of 175 seats. In the subsequent elections in 1975, 1977, 1979 and 1981, the party proved to be a permanent element in the Danish party structure. Glistrup appeared as the top candidate ("campaign leader") of his party until 1984, but was never elected chairman.

Glistrup largely prevented any constructive parliamentary work. Until 1989 the Frp refused to approve all budget laws. On the other hand, because of his provocative and simplistic statements, he was shunned by the established parties and practically excluded from legislative work.

Glistrup's creative tax-saving models resulted in a prison sentence for tax evasion , which he served from August 31, 1983 to March 11, 1985. Pia Kjærsgaard moved up for him as a member of parliament. She ran in the election campaigns from 1987 as a top candidate and opened the party after internal wing fights for a more conventional cooperation with other parliamentary groups in order to gain more political say. After returning to parliament in 1987, Glistrup appeared increasingly isolated and in 1989 publicly broke with the party line.

Glistrup was considered by many to be the only useful head of his party. In the course of time, however, political observers got the impression that behind his cynical calculation there was pure madness: crazy, but harmless, as the journalist Georg Metz indulgently summed up.

Political decline

On November 13, 1990, Mogens Glistrup founded the "Trivselspartiet" ( party of the upswing ). Just a week later, Prime Minister Poul Schlueter scheduled new elections because the Social Democrats had refused to approve his economic policy. In the remaining three weeks leading up to the election, Glistrups Trivselspartiet entered into a list connection with Fælles Kurs , a communist protest party that two years earlier had only been 0.1 percent short of breaking the blackout. This time it should be 0.2 percent. Glistrup, who formally remained a member of the Frp, not only lost his seat and vote on the party executive committee in 1991, but was also completely excluded. The old followers tried on recurring occasions to get his return.

Only long after Pia Kjærsgaard left the Frp in 1995 and founded the right-wing populist Danish People's Party with like-minded people , Glistrup was allowed to return to the Frp in 1999. His comeback provoked the exit of the entire Folketing faction. The now extra-parliamentary micro-party made Glistrup its top candidate in 2001. The election result was a disappointing 0.6 percent. He retired from active politics, not without first having been granted "lifelong honorary membership" in the Frp.

Anti-Islam statements

From the early 1980s, limiting immigration to Denmark became Glistrup's main concern. Glistrup has been fined several times for disparaging statements about Muslims , the first in 1985 for saying that all Muslims were brought up to wage holy war against the infidels. In 1999 he confessed in the daily Berlingske Tidende : “Of course I am a racist - they are all good Danes. You are either a racist or a traitor. ”In 2003, Glistrup was convicted of saying that“ the followers of Muhammad [had] come to Denmark to drive the Danes out of their homeland ”. The 20-day prison sentence was served in 2005.

Trivia

Glistrup's melodic Bornholm accent and his apparent delight in the calculated provocation became the target of numerous satires. Because of its unmistakable appearance, it was nicknamed "Sea Wolf". Since a joint interview in 1973 with the chairman of the Center Democrats , Erhard Jacobsen, Glistrup has been a fan of marzipan bread .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Troels Pedersen: Mogens Glistrup død , Børsen online, July 2, 2008, accessed July 19, 2013.
  2. ↑ Sa vilde var Glitrup and Spies. ( Memento from November 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Georg Metz: Mindet om et jordskred. In: Dagbladet Information. December 3, 2010 Online version (Danish). Accessed January 8, 2012
  4. ↑ letter in Aktuelt , February 4th 1985th
  5. ↑ Berlingske Tidende, October 11, 1999.
  6. ↑ Glistrup i fængsel igen June 29, 2005
personal data
SURNAME Glistrup, Mogens
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish politician, member of the Folketing
DATE OF BIRTH May 28, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Rønne
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 2008
Place of death Virum