It’s not long ago that an elderly man walked across Per Frederiksen’s summer house garden. The man stopped in the middle of the lawn with his son and daughter-in-law.
»Are you Mette Frederiksen’s father?« he asked.
It’s a common occurrence for people to show up at the family summer house in the small village of Bælum outside Aalborg, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Prime Minister.
But the ’father’ bit was new, Per Frederiksen admits.
»You can say a lot about me, but calling me her father is a bit much.«
Yet the elderly gentleman wasn’t entirely off the mark.
For Per Frederiksen is related to Mette Frederiksen. He’s not her parent, but her older brother by five years. As children, the siblings spent their summers in the small wooden house in Bælum, which Per Frederiksen took over from their father a few years ago.
As Politiken explores sibling bonds and their significance this summer, we were invited to visit him at the summer house in Northern Jutland for a conversation about what it’s like being the older brother to the country’s ultimate holder of power and everyone’s big sister.
He hasn’t asked his younger sister’s permission to participate in the interview, he assures me as he picks me up at the Aalborg station.
Not exactly, at least.
»But I did call Mette to make sure she doesn’t have any unresolved issues with Politiken,« he says.
Apart from that, her becoming Prime Minister hasn’t really upended their sibling roles. Mette Frederiksen has always been politically driven and the more ambitious of the two since they were kids. Per Frederiksen has never been interested in politics and never took on the traditional protective older brother role:
»It wasn’t necessary with Mette,« he says, as we arrive at the summer house and settle on the terrace.
For years, he’s mostly been an older brother from a distance. Apart from some fundamental Social Democratic values and the same set of eyes, they’re very different people and always have been.
»We are like fire and water,« he says.
But in recent years, their relationship has changed. Both because they’ve grown closer after their mother’s death and become better at tolerating each other’s differences. And because it affects an entire family when one member takes on such a powerful position as his younger sister has held for the past six years.
Momma’s boy and daddy’s girl
Per Frederiksen still remembers the gripping anticipation of awaiting a younger sister. He had stayed overnight with neighbors Jan and Gitte the November night in 1977 when she was born and was picked up by his father the next day and driven to Aalborg Hospital. Since children weren’t allowed in the maternity ward, he first laid eyes on his sister from the roof of his parents’ baby blue Fiat 128.
The excitement quickly vanished, replaced by years of frustration over »the annoying little sister« who wanted to be involved in everything. She wanted to play with the older boys when her brother had friends over and was allowed to by their father’s orders. Per Frederiksen, like many older brothers throughout time, just wanted her to leave his room and close the door behind her.
»I remember one of my friends once said to her: You should become a news anchor with all that talking. To which Mette replied: No, I’m going to be a politician! She was no more than seven years old then,« he says, explaining that she already had a certain political insistence about her.
He shifts in his garden chair and tries to explain what he means:
»She started very early with this fight against injustice, very early.«
It applied whether her older brother had done something wrong or there was an injustice somewhere in the world. It meant that while Per Frederiksen played ball and chased the sounds of other children most of his childhood, his younger sister practiced debating, raised funds for endangered snow leopards and the World Wildlife Fund, and organized her own petitions against animal testing in the perfume industry.
»She was also a scout for a very, very long time,« he says, chuckling.
But that’s how it was. If Per Frederiksen were to paint a picture from their childhood that also illustrates the siblings’ differences, it would look like this:
While his younger sister Mette sat in the living room with their father, who was on the county council in Aalborg, and their grandfather, who was a former deputy county mayor, listening intently to their political discussions, Per Frederiksen was in the kitchen with the family’s women, hearing stories about their ancestors and learning to make gratin.
»It’s actually hard to get right. It doesn’t always stay fluffy,« he says.
He’s inherited their mother’s temperament, which is »calmer.«
»Mette is daddy’s girl. And she definitely has our father’s temperament,« he says.
What kind of temperament is that?
»Oh definitely and now I’ll do this and so forth,« he says in Aalborg dialect and elaborates:
»She was undoubtedly the most stubborn of us, she was good at debating and she kept at it, you know? I’ve never been as good in a debate, so I probably was more the one who said, you get to be right, and I get peace,« he says.
»That’s probably why I ended up in the kitchen with the women.«
»Small victories are fine for me«
As the years passed, the irritation faded. But their differences didn’t.
Per Frederiksen spent a lot of time in the bars of Jomfru Ane Gade and was unsure of his future, while his sister spent weekends in Danmarks Socialdemokratiske Ungdom’s (DSU), the youth party of Socialdemokratiet, club rooms, started high school as the first in the family, and then went to Kenya, which was fairly exotic in Aalborg at the time. When she returned, she joined LO Youth (youth organization of the labor union), moved to Copenhagen at 19 – and in her brother’s words, »hasn’t been back to Jutland since.«
»I was less goal-oriented. But it was never a sorrow for me,« says Per Frederiksen.
He stayed in Aalborg and started technical school, training as a truck mechanic. But after assembling gearboxes and brakes for three years, he was fed up and instead joined the military. Twelve years in the defense followed, with deployments to both the Balkans and Iraq, and today he is the director of Precision Services, which repairs defense equipment.
»We’ve taken two completely different paths. I could be cheeky and say Mette has theoretical knowledge about many things. I have practical knowledge about many things,« he says.
But the siblings never competed or compared themselves.
»If I’d gone the same way, maybe I’d sit and think: What decision did you make that landed you there? And what did I do wrong? But we’ve been so different that there’s been nothing to compare.«
Were you ever sad that you didn’t share the family’s political interest?
»No. It’s a spark you’re born with. And I never had it. I’ll go as far as to say I saw it as irrelevant. It simply didn’t concern me,« he says.
We sit in our gray-blue cushions and look at each other in the sun.
»It’s not a situation where one can do something the other wants to. We have completely different approaches to life,« he says.
He squints a bit. Then he gets up and goes to the kitchen to fetch two trays from Lagkagehuset. One has two raspberry slices, the other two chocolate muffins.
»I pulled this number yesterday,« he says.
It turns out he had already stood at Aalborg Station at 1 PM the day before with similar trays of cake because he had misunderstood the date. He had to leave them with the neighbor and try again today.
Now he looks at the second batch of raspberry slices and chocolate muffins and says:
»I bought two of each to make sure there was something you’d like.«
For Per Frederiksen, a large part of life’s satisfaction lies in the small things you can do for others.
»I like helping the individual with something concrete. That’s what gives me value. The most political I’ve been is safety representative at the barracks in Holstebro. Because I need to see the person I’m helping. Small victories are fine for me,« he says.
His sister, on the other hand, has always had her gaze far beyond the fields of Aalborg. Towards the world and the changes you can make »at the largest possible scale.«
»For Mette, it wasn’t just injustice in the municipality, county, or region,« he says.
»It was everything.«
Not really really close
Although the differences have been so obvious that there was no basis for comparison between Per Frederiksen and his sister, it has probably also created some distance between them.
»We haven’t been reaaly really close for most of our adult lives,« he says.
For a number of years, they were also very politically divided. It’s not that they’re on opposite ends of the political spectrum. And he has also voted for his sister when she moved her constituency to Aalborg and would do so again. Because as he says:
»She may be annoying. But I am proud of her. That’s my little sister, and she’s the freaking Prime Minister.«
But when it comes to defense, where Per Frederiksen worked for 12 years, they’ve had trouble agreeing.
»I was in defense for some years when they just cut and cut and cut while we had to participate in international missions. Back then, I thought you need to give the workers the right tools if you want to send them on a mission, and Mette was much more about saving the planet,« he says of the years when Mette Frederiksen had a more pacifist view on defense and rearmament than today.
»Now she works with parties across the center, so we’re less divided now,« he adds.
He could certainly offer a few good suggestions on how the government should act in other contexts. But he doesn’t. Because the siblings agreed a few years ago not to talk politics anymore.
»We’ve both reached the point where we say that for it to be pleasant when we’re together, we shouldn’t talk politics, so now we agree to disagree,« he says.
And after they lost their mother 13 years ago, it’s as if something else has come to the forefront.
»Mette and I really got close when we lost our mother. When she was gone, we sort of squeezed together. I think it was an acknowledgment that now it’s just the three of us, and our father isn’t getting any younger. Now we talk about our family, and it’s meant we’ve gotten along better,« he says.
But it’s not really that they’ve become more alike.
»Mette is more extroverted than I am, and she can think on her feet and respond immediately to a government questioning session. I need to turn things over in my head. I’m probably a bit more analytical,« he says, adding:
»The more mature we’ve become, the more understanding we’ve gained of how the other is.«
Can we get a selfie, Mette?
It’s not just when he talks to her or when a passersby occasionally want to see the summer house where Mette Frederiksen stayed as a child that Per Frederiksen is confronted with who his sister is.
CEOs of large companies, who never paid him any mind before, suddenly want to talk to him.
It’s also not uncommon for him to be confronted with it in private settings.
»As recently as yesterday, someone said... »Per, I need some help with a company down in Italy, can’t you just tell your sister this and that«. I’ve had to be very clear in my rejection of such questions. And honestly. What do they think? It’s unlikely she calls her older brother from Northern Jutland first when she has top officials advising her,« he says.
The increased interest, which rubs off on him, also means he’s very aware of whether people have ulterior motives for talking to him. Recently, he was due for a course in France and found himself checking several times that the participants were chosen by the industry and not politically.
»You shouldn’t become totally paranoid. But I don’t want to participate in anything because my sister is the Prime Minister,« he says.
It can also be annoying in private life.
»It can happen that at a party, someone starts saying: »Do you know who his sister is?« It can actually be a bit of a party stopper,« he says, explaining that in dating life, it can also lead to people either withdrawing or becoming more interested when they hear he’s Mette Frederiksen’s older brother.
»But it’s not her they’re going on a date with, is it?« he says.
During COVID, it seemed to accelerate and take on a different character. Not a day went by without someone asking Per Frederiksen if he could tell his sister to open or close something, and messages flooded his Facebook from old classmates and acquaintances the family has known all their lives.
»People wrote to me that my sister and the whole family should die,« he says.
Sometimes he thinks it must be hard for his sister because she lives with it all the time.
»When we meet, people constantly come up to Mette and ask for a selfie with her, she can never get drunk because what if the phone rings and there’s been a terrorist attack? She had to move her wedding because it coincided with an EU summit. She’s also kind of at work when she’s off,« he says.
But for him, the idea of such a job is unappealing, mainly because of the immense responsibility. All her decisions affect a large number of people.
»I don’t envy Mette. Not at all. No, I’m fine where I am today,« he says, getting up from the table.
We take a walk through the summer house, which remains pretty much as it was when they were children. We stop in front of a picture above the couch of the two siblings as kids. A boy with long hair by his ears and a little girl with a round head and bob. The family lore says it’s the only time they were this close as children.
Per Frederiksen smiles.
»Maybe Mette got the head, but I definitely got the looks, right?«.
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