Note (Back) — Chapter XXX

The ministers, so the constitution affirms, are responsible for the conduct of the government.[791] The king's signature of a measure gives it legal character only if accompanied by the signature of one or more of the ministers, and ministers may be called to account by the Folkething, as well as by the king, for their conduct in office. There is, furthermore, a special Court of Impeachment for the trial of ministers against whom charges are brought. On the surface, these arrangements seem to imply the existence of a parliamentary system of government, with a ministry answerable singly and collectively to the popular legislative chamber. In point of fact, however, there has been all the while much less parliamentarism in Denmark than seemingly is contemplated in the constitution, and it is hardly too much to say that since the adoption of the present constitution the most interminable of political controversies in the kingdom has been that centering about the question of the responsibility of ministers. Until at least within the past decade, the practice of the crown has been regularly to appoint ministers independently and to maintain them in office in disregard of, and even in defiance of, the wishes of the popular branch of the legislature. The desire of the Liberals has been to inaugurate a thoroughgoing parliamentary régime, under which the sovereign should be obligated to select his ministers from the party in control of the Folkething and the ministers, in turn, should be responsible to the Folkething, in fact as well as in theory, for all of their official acts. Throughout the prolonged period covered by the ministry of Jakob Estrup (1875-1894) the conflict upon this issue was incessant. During the whole of the period Estrup and his colleagues commanded the support of a majority in the Landsthing, but were accorded the votes of only a minority in the lower chamber. After the elections of 1884, indeed, the Government could rely upon a total of not more than nineteen votes in that chamber.