A Pole sentenced to four months in prison for assaulting Denmark’s Prime Minister will be deported and banned from returning to the country for the next six years.
An unidentified 39-year-old man, who has been in pre-trial detention since the attack, is accused of hitting Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen with a clenched fist on her right shoulder. As a result, she lost her balance but did not fall. Frederiksen suffered whiplash at the time.
The Copenhagen District Court handed down a sentence, which the defendant did not appeal. The Court stated that the attack “emphasised the nature of the violence and that the violence against the prime minister occurred in connection with her performance of her duties as prime minister.”
The man also pleaded guilty to other charges, including sexual assault when he exposed himself to passers-by and groped a woman at a commuter train station, and fraud with bottles and deposit-marked cans at two supermarkets.
On Wednesday, Prosecutor Anders Larsson demanded four months in prison for assaulting the prime minister and exposing his private parts to passers-by, saying that while his sexual acts were not crude, they “were certainly uncomfortable” for those who saw it.
His behavior and demeanor are far removed from a citizen who should be in our society.
Frederiksen was on a private break between the Social Democratic Party’s campaign for elections to a revitalised European Parliament when the attack took place in a busy downtown Copenhagen plaza. The 46-year-old prime minister, in office since 2019, was campaigning for her party’s EU leadership candidate, Christel Schaldemose.
The attack came amid widespread violence against politicians in Europe ahead of European Union elections.
In May, the candidate of Germany’s centre-left Social Democrats was beaten and seriously injured while campaigning. In Slovakia, the campaign was marred by the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Robert Fico on 15 May, which shocked the country and echoed across Europe.
