Trying to answer questions about the former Danish PM who is now to be General Secretary of NATO, I have some explaining to do. Say a native English speaker looks up his name 'Anders Fogh Rasmussen' in Wikipedia. They will find this sentence in the introduction: "He was the leader of the Liberal Party (Venstre), and headed a centre-right coalition of his Liberal Party". The confusion starts. How can he be 'centre-right' and 'liberal' at the same time? In English 'liberals' are to the left of the center. But in Danish a 'liberal' politician is someone who prefers an policy based on the free market and as little control by the state as possible. Not quite the same.
The fact that the name of the party 'Venstre' means 'Left' only adds to the misperception, that they are in fact liberals. The name, however is from the time when Denmark only had two parties; one for the farmers (Venstre) and one for the upperclass (Højre). The latter became 'the Conservative People's' in 1915, but even as more parties came in from the left - including the Social Democrats in 1871 - the original farmers party kept their name 'Venstre'.
So the bottomline is that the new General Secretary of Nato is a lot more of a capitalist than the term 'liberal' indicate.
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