Copenhagen---Danes streamed to the polls on Thursday for an election that was too close to call, after an intense three-week campaign focused on immigration and the economy.
"I'm asking people to vote for certainty and they know what they get with me. They get a stable economy and they get good welfare," Social Democratic Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said as she arrived outside a Copenhagen polling station with husband Stephen Kinnock, a British Labour MP.
The campaign has been dominated by the economy, the future of the country's cherished cradle-to-grave welfare state, and immigration and the rising cost of hosting asylum seekers.
Thorning-Schmidt and right-wing opposition leader Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who governed from 2009 to 2011, have both claimed credit for a resurgent economy and both have tried to woo voters with pledges to curb immigration.
In the capital's immigrant-heavy neighbourhood of Norrebro, only a handful of foreigners were seen voting early, as the election fell on the first day of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
But sales assistant Nafees was one of several to cast his vote for the far-left Red Green Alliance.
"It's one of the few parties that recognised Palestine as a state... They know what it's like to be and to live here and to be a foreigner," he said.
Teofilo Rocha, a bank worker, said he would vote for the Social Democrats. "I think it's a party I can trust," he said.
- Wooing undecided voters -
Politicians of all stripes campaigned until the last minute amid speculation that the outcome of the race could be decided in Denmark's two former colonies, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and by the almost 20 percent of undecided voters.
Inside Copenhagen's central station on Thursday morning, party leaders took part in a live TV broadcast, handing out flyers and balloons to selfie-snapping commuters as they stepped off the set.
AFP
