Copenhagen, Denmark — The trial of a Pole accused of punching Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in the shoulder in June began Tuesday, and Frederiksen is not expected to appear in court.
She suffered a minor whiplash injury when a man attacked her in central Copenhagen on June 7 and canceled his schedule for the next few days.
The Ekstra Bladet newspaper said the unidentified 39-year-old Pole is accused of hitting Frederiksen on the right shoulder with a closed fist, causing him to lose balance but not fall.
Defense lawyer Henrik Karl Nielsen told the Copenhagen District Court that his client pleaded not guilty.
The Pole, who has lived in Denmark for five years, told the court that he was “alcohol intoxicated but not drunk” and was simply wandering around when he saw Frederiksen, Danish public broadcaster DR reported.
A police officer assigned to protect Frederiksen told the court that she had stopped to talk on the phone when the man approached her and punched her after saying something incomprehensible.
“In that situation, it seemed like he was angry,” the bodyguard, identified only by his police number KF081, told the court, according to DR.
The Pole was immediately arrested.
Frederiksen was taking a break from campaigning for his Social Democratic Party in the European Parliament elections when the assault occurred in a busy square in central Copenhagen. The attack was not related to the campaign event.
The man, who has been arrested in preventive detention since the assault, also faces other charges including sexual harassment by exposing himself to passersby and groping a woman at a commuter train station, and fraud involving deposit-marked bottles and cans at two supermarkets. She has confessed to those charges.
Frederiksen, 46, is leader of the Social Democratic Party and has been Denmark’s prime minister since 2019. She led the country through the global COVID-19 pandemic and a controversial 2020 decision to wipe out Denmark’s entire captive mink population for minimize the risk of mammals spreading the virus.
The trial is scheduled to end on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear when the verdict would be announced.
The attack came as violence against politicians spread in the run-up to the EU elections. In May, a candidate for Germany’s center-left Social Democrats was defeated and was seriously injured during the campaign.
In Slovakia, the campaign was overshadowed by an attempt to murder populist Prime Minister Robert Fico on May 15, sending shockwaves across the country and reverberating across Europe. fico He was shot in the abdomen and seriously injured. The suspect was immediately arrested and faces terrorism charges.
Attacks on politicians in Denmark are rare.
On March 23, 2003, two activists threw red paint at then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen inside parliament and were immediately arrested.
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