Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has been assaulted by a man in central Copenhagen earlier today.
Police said on social media platform X they had arrested a man and were investigating the incident but declined to give further detail.
Her office said in a statement: ‘Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was beaten on Friday evening at Kultorvet (square, red.) in Copenhagen by a man who was subsequently arrested. The Prime Minister is shocked by the incident.’
A local, Soren Kjergaard, who works as a barista on the square, saw the prime minister being escorted away by security following the assault.
She claimed the Prime Minister was unscathed in the attack and and had no outward signs of harm, although she ‘seemed a little stressed’.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen who has been assaulted by a man in central Copenhagen earlier today
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaks to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a Nordic summit, in Stockholm, on Friday, May 31, 2024
EU chief Charles Michel and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Friday slammed the attack on Frederiksen.
Metsola urged the Danish head of government to ‘keep strong’, while adding in a post to X that ‘violence has no place in politics.’
Michel in turn said he was ‘outraged by the assault’.
‘I strongly condemn this cowardly act of aggression,’ the European Council president said in a separate post to X.
EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen also condemned what she called a ‘despicable act which goes against everything we believe and fight for in Europe’, in a statement to social media.
The assault comes two days before Danes head to the polls in the EU election and just three weeks after Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was seriously injured in an assassination attempt.
Mr Fico, 59, was shot in the abdomen as he greeted supporters last month outside a cultural centre in the town of Handlova, nearly 85 miles north-east of the capital Bratislava.
Video footage showed the Slovak premier approach people gathered at barricades and reach out to shake hands as a man stepped forward, extended his arm and fired five rounds before being tackled and arrested.
Her later underwent two hours of surgery to remove dead tissue from his gunshot wounds.
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