Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II introduced Sunday that she plans to abdicate after 52 years and hand over the throne to her son, Crown Prince Frederik.
The queen, who’s Europe’s longest-reigning residing monarch, introduced throughout her New Yr’s speech that she would step down on Jan. 14th, which is the anniversary of her personal accession to the throne at age 31 following the demise of her father, King Frederik IX.
Margrethe, 83, stated the again surgical procedure she underwent in early 2023 led to “ideas concerning the future” and when to cross on the obligations of the crown to her son. “I’ve determined that now’s the suitable time,” she stated in her speech.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen paid tribute to her in an announcement, providing a “heartfelt thanks to Her Majesty the Queen for her lifelong dedication and tireless efforts for the Kingdom.”
Margrethe is the “epitome of Denmark” Frederiksen’s assertion learn, and “all through the years has put phrases and emotions into who we’re as a folks and as a nation.”
The 6-foot-tall (1.82-meters-tall), chain-smoking Margrethe has been one of the crucial in style public figures in Denmark, the place the monarch’s position is basically ceremonial. She usually walked the streets of Copenhagen just about unescorted and received the admiration of Danes for her heat manners and for her skills as a linguist and designer.
A eager skier, she was a member of a Danish girls’s air power unit as a princess, collaborating in judo programs and endurance assessments within the snow. Margrethe remained powerful at the same time as she grew older. In 2011, at age 70, she visited Danish troops in southern Afghanistan carrying a navy jumpsuit.
As monarch, she crisscrossed the nation and often visited Greenland and the Faeroe Islands — the 2 semi-independent territories which are a part of the Danish Realm — and was met in every single place by cheering crowds.
Denmark has Europe’s oldest ruling monarchy, which traces its line again to the Viking king Gorm the Previous, who died in 958. Though Magrethe is head of state, the Danish Structure strictly dominated out her involvement in occasion politics.
But the queen was clearly well-versed in legislation and knew the contents of the laws she was referred to as upon to signal.
She obtained coaching in French and English from her earliest years, in addition to Swedish from her mom. Along with archaeology, she studied philosophy, political science and economics at universities in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Cambridge together with the London College of Economics and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Ever since his start on Might 26, 1968, Frederik André Henrik Christian has been the inheritor to the Danish throne.
He’s the oldest son of Queen Margrethe and her late French-born husband, Prince Henrik, who died in February 2018. Frederik, 55, has a youthful brother, Prince Joachim.
Because the age of 18, he has served as regent every time his mom was exterior the dominion and carried out official duties, shaking arms with hundreds and receiving international dignitaries.
The queen’s announcement made up just a few sentences on the finish of her wide-ranging New Yr’s speech which mirrored on the “turbulence and upheaval on the earth” amid the wars within the Center East and Ukraine, and the local weather disaster.
However she additionally thanked her nation’s folks for “the heat and hospitality I meet with in every single place in Denmark.”
Whereas lavishing accolades on the queen, the prime minister additionally regarded to the longer term.
“Within the new 12 months, Crown Prince Frederik might be proclaimed king. Crown Princess Mary will turn out to be queen. The dominion can have a brand new regent and a brand new royal couple,” he stated in an announcement. “We are able to stay up for all of this within the information that they’re prepared for the duty and the duty.”