Alert slug about the danish elections

"After the financial crash: Maglev across the Kattegat" permeates the Danish election campaign

by Michelle Rasmussen

With the slogan, "After the financial crash: Maglev across the Kattegat," the independent candidacies in the Nov. 13 Danish parliamentary election of Tom Gillesberg, the chairman of the Schiller Institute (SI) in Denmark, and three Schiller Institute activists, have become the "talk of the town," and have succeeded in putting the international financial collapse, the need for a transition to a great infrastructure project orientation, and the leadership of the LaRouche-allied Schiller Institute, squarely on the political map. This accellerating momentum has especially resulted from campaign outreach, comprised of a combination of the mass circulation of the SI's campaign newspapers (each of the four has reached 1% of the Danish population), visibility of the candidate's unique posters with the above slogan, extensive press coverage generated in most of the major media, street campaigning with a LaRouche Youth Movement chorus wearing maglev hats, as well as the campaign's internet homepage www.sive.dk.

The candidacies of Tom Gillesberg in Copenhagen, Feride Istogu Gillesberg in the Copenhagen suburbs, Janus Kramer M\F8ller in east Jutland, and Hans Schultz in north Jutland cover four of the ten election districts, and tremendous excitement has been generated about introducing maglev technology in these geographic areas which would be served by the construction of the first two phases of the SI's national maglev plan -- Copenhagen to \C5rhus in east Jutland(in 25 minutes) across a new Kattegat bridge, and then onwards to Aalborg in north Jutland. Under the campaign slogan, all four campaign posters feature a picture of the candidate beside a bridge (the very sucessful Great Belt Bridge) and a maglev running beside it. It is the only poster with content, other than a picture of the candidate and name. The poster in itself generated calls to the candidates asking for interviews, and was given the best poster award by Politiken's culture critics, complete with a half-page picture of Tom Gillesberg's poster, and a summary of his main campaign issues.

The campaign has also brought the international financial collapse to the Danish voters and political institutions, with prominent press coverage which ranges from just reporting on the slogan "After the financial crash...," to an indepth interview on the subject with Tom Gillesberg in the internet edition of the major Copenhagen daily Berlingske Tidende. On Nov. 5, Berlingske Tidende also printed an article by their Brussels correspondent, Ole Bang Nielsen, which explicitly called for a governmental conference to establish a new monetary system to replace the old Bretton Woods agreement, as a result of the crisis created by the expected continued fall of the dollar. Tom Gillesberg was actually scheduled to give testimony in the Danish parliament's Political and Economic Committe on the world financial collapse and LaRouche's New Bretton Woods solution on Oct. 25, the very day after the election was called, but the parliament was dismissed in order to campaign. But through the campaign, the word about the financial crash and the solution, has reached far beyong the walls of the parliament.

Press coverage includes(English translations of most of the coverage are available at www.sive.dk):

• the most widely seen national TV evening news broadcast on TV2, and good coverage on TV2's affiliates in east and north Jutland and Bornholm.
• all three of the major Copenhagen dailies, Politiken, Berlingske Tidende (internet edition) and Jyllands Posten, which is also the largest nationwide paper, and two of the four free newspapers distributed at every subway station and on every bus in Copenhagen. The coverage in the tabloid Ekstra Bladet's internet edition generated 6,000 clicks into Feride's homepage.
• Copenhagen University radio, and TV2 radio.

Now, the genie can not be put back into the bottle.

In Berlingske Tidende's election day edition, there is a page about "really special election planks," with different titles for about 15 candidates who stand out from the rest. Under the title "Visionary," is Tom Gillesberg, independent candidate, for his slogan, "After the financial crash: maglev across the Kattegat."