Denmark PM Mette Frederiksen has been left “shocked” after being attacked on the street in Copenhagen, her workplace says.
The assault happened on a sq. within the centre of town the place a person walked as much as her and hit her.
The attacker has been arrested.
European Fee chief Ursula von der Leyen known as it a “despicable act, which matches in opposition to the whole lot we consider in and battle for in Europe”.
“Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was crushed on Friday night at Kultorvet in Copenhagen by a person who was subsequently arrested. The prime minister is shocked by the incident,” the prime minister’s workplace stated in a press release with out giving additional element.
Police stated they’d arrested a person and had been investigating the incident, however declined to say extra.
There isn’t any phrase on a motive but.
Two witnesses, Marie Adrian and Anna Ravn, informed native newspaper BT that they’d seen the assault.
“A person got here by in the wrong way and gave her a tough shove on the shoulder, inflicting her to fall to the facet,” the 2 girls informed the newspaper.
They stated that whereas it was a “sturdy push” the prime minister didn’t hit the bottom.
She then sat down at a café, they added.
The assault comes two days earlier than Denmark votes within the EU election.
Ms Frederiksen, chief of Denmark’s Social Democrats, had earlier taken half in a European election occasion together with her occasion’s lead candidate Christel Schaldemose, Denmark’s TV2 studies.
The Social Democrats are the largest occasion in Denmark’s coalition authorities. They nonetheless lead the polls, however their help has fallen again significantly in latest months.
Danish Atmosphere Minister Magnus Heunicke stated on X: “Mette is of course shocked by the assault. I have to say that it shakes all of us who’re near her.”
EU chief Charles Michel stated on X that he was “outraged”.
“I strongly condemn this cowardly act of aggression,” he stated.
The assault comes lower than a month after Slovak PM Robert Fico was shot a number of instances as he greeted supporters. He survived and has since undergone surgical procedure.
Ms Frederiksen, 46, turned prime minister in 2019 after taking on as chief of the centre-left Social Democrats 4 years earlier. This made her the youngest prime minister in Danish historical past.
Quickly after, she turned embroiled in a spat with then-President Donald Trump after she rebuffed his concept of the US shopping for Greenland.
Mr Trump known as her “nasty” after she dismissed the suggestion of such a land deal as “absurd”.
In 2022, Ms Frederiksen was closely criticised by a fee investigating her authorities’s choice to cull hundreds of thousands of mink in the course of the Covid pandemic.
