This blog may be guilty of occasional snark, but it doesn’t dwell on personal gossip. We’re going to make up for that today (although, please note, this post was written before the last piece of news in the story appeared). Søren Pape Poulsen, the Conservative Party chair, recently announced his candidacy for prime minister. This was noteworthy because a Conservative hasn’t served as prime minister since Poul Schluter’s tenure ended in the early 90s. The Liberal Party has been the largest right-wing party in the country and has supplied the prime minister for the governing right-wing coalitions since then.

Pape Poulsen and husband celebrating the queen’s 50-year reign. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen © Ritzau Scanpix.

But the Liberals have been in disarray lately after the defection of two leading figures, former Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and former Integration Minister Inger Støjberg. Their new leader, Jacob Ellemann-Jensen, is not considered a strong candidate, and in the latest polls, support for the Conservatives surpassed that of the Liberals by a substantial margin. Pape Poulsen’s candidacy was therefore no surprise, as Ellemann-Jensen himself noted.

Pape is known mainly for two things. First, he is gay, as he announced when he accepted the party’s leadership position. Almost everyone seems to think it’s a good thing that a gay person can be a party leader, especially of a conservative party. Second, he is generally perceived as a nice guy, friendly, reasonable, and comfortable to be around. In a 2019 poll, he ranked as the country’s most trustworthy party leader. His agreeableness has the downside, though, that he hasn’t often staked out bold positions or engaged in hard ideological combat. Nevertheless, he is viewed as a plausible solution to the fractured state of the right wing; Schluter, who served as prime minister for ten years, had also been a unifying compromise choice by the conservative bloc.

A transatlantic intern with big plans

Pape’s political innocence ended recently, though, when a strange scandal broke regarding his husband. No one accuses Pape himself of any wrongdoing in this case, but a pattern of bizarre claims raises questions about his judgment. In 2014, when Pape presented his then-boyfriend, Josue Medina Vazquez, at the Conservative Party conference, he mentioned that “his uncle is the president of the Dominican Republic.” This was meant to indicate that politics was a shared interest of theirs. The year before, a local paper in Jutland had written that Josue’s uncle had “big plans” for him.

A Latino partner was also perfectly acceptable in Danish politics; it was another intersectional feather in Pape’s cap. Vasquez Poulsen, as he is now known, got into the news for a couple of public scrapes since becoming an intern in Pape’s office as Mayor of Viborg, Jutland. In 2018, he was arrested for drunken driving (DK) after staff at a local Burger King tipped off the police. Later that year, he was assaulted (DK) at a Copenhagen bar at 3:30 a.m. by a visiting Slovakian ice hockey fan under disputed circumstances; it was first called, but then not ruled, a hate crime.

Bob’s not really your uncle

But last month the tabloid Ekstra Bladet unearthed a bigger story: Vasquez Poulsen wasn’t the Dominican Republic president’s nephew (DK). The family of the president at the time, Danilo Medina Sánchez, had never heard of Josue and couldn’t recognize him from photos. The family’s lawyer cited birth certificates of both Danilo and Josue showing that the two had no familial relation.

The Conservative Party media rep acknowledged in a text message that the lawyer was correct but added that Josue’s father had a familiær relation to the DR president’s family and that it was customary in the DR to call remote relatives “uncle” or “aunt.” Familiær can mean either “familial” or “familiar.” The spokesperson didn’t specify what he believed the relation was. Pape didn’t respond to the paper’s inquiries.

Said unto the Israelites

In 2020, in what sounds like an April Fool’s Day gag, Pape told representatives of the Israeli Embassy and the local Jewish community that his husband was Jewish and had provided him with advice on Jewish issues: “And [he] went to synagogue since his infancy with his family every single Saturday.” After Pape’s candidacy opened his life up to further investigation, the dogged detectives at Ekstra Bladet learned from several sources that Josue’s family was not Jewish (DK). They were in fact rather devout Seventh Day Adventists and had even founded and led a congregation.

After all, it wasn’t likely that the Dominican head of state came from a Jewish family. Pape missed an intersectional triple on that one. For two weeks, he didn’t respond to Ekstra Bladet’s requests for comments on this new information. Finally he wrote, “I didn’t know that we had to register Jews in Denmark.” That’s puzzling to interpret, since the Jew in question was imaginary.

FB, the secular confessional

Danes don’t usually pass judgment on politicians’ private lives; no one gets impeached for a blowjob. But in another episode, Pape’s relationship apparently led him to cross the line into official business. In 2018, when he was Minister of Justice, he took a trip to DR with Josue and met informally with Dominican politicians. The current Justice Minister criticized him for attending the meeting without the Foreign Ministry’s and Danish Embassy’s knowledge and without reporting on it. At the meeting, a friend traveling with Pape, Frans Hammer, was presented to the Dominican president as the Danish deputy sports minister (DK), a position and a ministry that don’t exist.

Last week, Conservative party officials were about to hold their annual conference, and Pape couldn’t remain silent about these stories. He acknowledged them in a classic Facebook non-apology: “My husband has said things that are wrong, while other things are based on misunderstandings.” He also regretted the informal meeting with Dominican officials. A couple of days later, he announced, also on FB, that “our marriage is over” (DK). Everyone seems relieved and wishes them both the best.