Why the Danish Prime Minister Is Campaigning in the U.K. Election

It’s normally a rule-of-thumb that politicians do not get involved in the domestic politics of other nations. Yet the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was seen on Thursday morning coming out of a polling station in Aberavon in west Wales.

On Thursday, the U.K. is voting for a new legislature and government.

Thorning-Schmidt was there to support her husband, Stephen Kinnock, who is the left-of-center Labour Party candidate. Kinnock is best known in the U.K. as the son of former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Thorning-Schmidt is best known in the U.S. as the woman who incurred Michelle Obama’s displeasure after posing for a selfie with her husband and and U.K Prime Minister David Cameron (who is the leader of the right-of-center Conservative Party) in 2013 at the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

Kinnock said he was hoping for a good result. “We’ve worked hard for every single vote so I don’t think we describe it as a safe seat at all. It’s a seat where you have to fight for every single vote. We’ve had thousands of conversations, almost up to 10,000, walked hundreds of miles, I’ve had a great team helping.”