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 could be the appropriate 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 vital fashionable public figures in Denmark, the place the monarch’s function is essentially 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 ladies’s air pressure unit as a princess, collaborating in judo programs and endurance exams within the snow. Margrethe remained robust whilst she grew older. In 2011, at age 70, she visited Danish troops in southern Afghanistan carrying a army jumpsuit.
As monarch, she crisscrossed the nation and recurrently visited Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, the 2 semi-independent territories that are a part of the Danish Realm, and was met all over the 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 celebration politics.
But the queen was clearly well-versed in regulation 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 Faculty 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 February 2018. Frederik, 55, has a youthful brother, Prince Joachim.
For the reason that age of 18, he has served as regent every time his mom was outdoors the dominion and carried out official duties, shaking arms with 1000’s and receiving overseas dignitaries.
The queen’s announcement made up only some 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 all over the place in Denmark.”
Whereas lavishing accolades on the queen, the prime minister additionally appeared to the longer term.
“Within the new 12 months, Crown Prince Frederik might be proclaimed king. Crown Princess Mary will grow to be queen. The dominion can have a brand new regent and a brand new royal couple,” he stated in his assertion. “We are able to look ahead to all of this within the data that they’re prepared for the accountability and the duty.”
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