Danish voters ousted the government of Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and backed an opposition in which the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party emerged as the biggest force.

After talks on Friday, Liberal Party leader Lars Loekke Rasmussen was given the mandate to try to form a majority government comprised of his group, the Danish People’s Party, the Liberal Alliance and the Conservatives.

“I’ll start talks to form a government tomorrow,” Rasmussen said in a TV2 broadcast late Friday. “It has been a tough campaign for everybody involved.”

Loekke was overtaken by the People’s Party, which won one-fifth of the votes and almost doubled its backing since 2011 after promising Danes tougher immigration and asylum laws. The party is also skeptical toward Denmark’s European Union membership and has argued in favor of border controls to defy the single market’s free movement of labor.

“What’s key for us is that we get the most influence,” Kristian Thulesen Dahl, leader of the People’s Party, said in an interview in Copenhagen.

The result marks a blow to a beleaguered EU, which faces the threat of a U.K. exit and a worsening crisis in Greece. The People’s Party has said it’s willing to enter an alliance with other EU-skeptical parties that would ask Danes to vote much more often on European reforms.

David Fuller's view

A shift is underway in Europe.  Countries are starting to balk at EU governance which is left of centre and run by too many unelected bureaucrats.  A move against unrestrained immigration is the most emotive topic and this will spread to other issues which also touch on employment and GDP growth.

I think the trend of ever more centralised government within the EU has peaked and is now starting to move in the opposite direction.  This will be popular with voters, not least in the UK which will hold an ‘in / out’ referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017.