Alex Vanopslagh

In 2021, Alex Vanopslagh, the chairman of Denmark’s Liberal Alliance party, was laid low by stress and anxiety. It was a strange reckoning for a politician whose public brand was built on the slogan “Du kan godt” — “You can do it.” In this conversation with priest Sørine Godfredsen, Vanopslagh dissects the gap between his own combative, contrarian drive and the limits that life eventually imposes, tracing a line from a childhood pact never to be weak, through adolescent rebellion and fan-club excess, to a hard-won Christian faith that he describes as still incomplete.

The Pact Against Weakness and the Need to Be the Opposite

Vanopslagh opens by recalling a private vow he made as a young boy on a school playground: no one would ever get him to leave his field, and he would never be like other people. This early resolve hardened into a lifelong tendency to act as “Rasmus Modsat” — the contrarian, the one who challenges consensus for its own sake. He joined the Danish People’s Party youth wing in sixth grade, not out of deep conviction, but because it was controversial, especially in the wake of the Mohammed cartoon crisis. “If everyone agreed that a pop group was super good, then I thought it was bad music, and I would never have heard it,” he says. He admits this is rooted in a kind of arrogance — a feeling that the crowd does not know better.