Video does not show Danish PM confronted by a Pakistani Muslim

What is the claim?

A video is circulating on social media with the claim that it shows the Prime Minister of Denmark being confronted by a Pakistani Muslim. The video surfaced days after the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, was attacked on June 7, 2024, in central Copenhagen, allegedly by a Polish citizen. Frederiksen was hospitalized after the attack, and the suspect is currently in custody.

The viral video is captioned, "Denmark PM confronted by a Pakistani Muslim. "We have 5 children while you have 1 or 2. In 10 years, there will be more P***s (Muslims) than Danes here. There are only 5 million Danes. You will soon be exterminated" (sic)."

The video consists of two separate videos edited together. The first 30 seconds show a man in a blue shirt saying, "We will spend the rest of our lives here. We are having 5 children (sic), you are having 1-2 children." Archived versions of such posts on Facebook can be viewed here and here. 

In the second clip, at the one-minute mark, two men are visible, yelling, "You Danish pig." The man they are shouting at replies, "Denmark for the Danes." 

Users on X (formerly Twitter) have also shared this video, and archived versions of such posts can be viewed here and here.

Screenshot of the social media posts claiming Denmark's prime minister was 'confronted by a Pakistani Muslim.' (Source: Facebook/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, the videos do not show a confrontation between the Danish Prime Minister and a Pakistani Muslim. The current Prime Minister is Mette Frederiksen, a woman, and the person being confronted in the videos is a man.

Video 1

We conducted a reverse image search and were led to an article posted on the website of the Nordic neo-Nazi group NordFront, dated April 30, 2020. According to the article, the now-viral video was captured at an anti-immigrant demonstration held in Tilst, Aarhus, in 2020, organized by Rasmus Paludan, a Danish politician who heads the Stram Kurs party, a far right-wing fringe party based in Denmark.

We conducted a keyword search to check whether Stram Kurs shared this video on its social media accounts. We found a longer version of the now-viral video shared on the Stram Kurs Facebook page on April 26, 2020. The video was shared with the caption that it shows a "stranger" who allegedly claimed "his name was Muhammad" confronting a Danish man at the demonstration held on April 24, 2020.

A comparison of the now-viral video and the 2020 video shared by Stram Kurs on Facebook. (Source: Facebook/StramKurs/Screenshot)

We also found that this video had been uploaded to Rasmus Paludan's YouTube channel, which has now been taken down for violating YouTube's Terms of Service. However, we found an archive of the video that captured the demonstration in 2020, corroborating the details in the article and the Facebook post.

Danish tabloid newspaper B.T. also reported on the video, stating that Prime Minister Metter Frederiksen is not present in the video.

Video 2

A reverse image search of the second video, which shows two men yelling at another man wearing a black coat, led us to an article published on September 20, 2018, in NewsPeek, an anti-immigrant blog based in Denmark. According to this report, immigrant residents of the Taastrupgaard neighborhood of Copenhagen were protesting against Rasmus Paludan, who can be seen in the video at the 0:06 mark.

A comparison of the man seen in the viral video and Rasmus Paludan's image from his social media page. (Source: X/Facebook/rasmuspaludan/Screenshots/Composite by Logically Facts)

To verify this report, we used frames from this video and found that Paludan had also shared this video on his YouTube channel, which has since been taken down for violating YouTube guidelines. While we could not access the original video, we found an archive of the video on the video archiving website Alt Censored, which documents videos that have been taken down. Paludan's video was titled "Taastrupgaard 17 juli 2018," and the archived video can be viewed here. We found that the deleted YouTube link of this video and AltCensored's archived link have the same URL.

It is to be noted that Lars Løkke Rasmussen was the Prime Minister of Denmark in 2018. Still, the evidence above establishes that the man being shouted at in this video is not Rasmussen but Paluden. Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats was elected Prime Minister in 2019.

Who is Rasmus Paludan, and why did he face protests?

Paludan is the founder of the anti-immigration party Stram Kurs (Hard Line) and is an anti-Islam politician who gained notoriety for burning copies of the Quran and posting recordings of the events to his now-deleted YouTube channel. His Quran burnings led to major riots in Sweden in 2022 and invited significant outrage in 2023 after an incident outside the Turkish Embassy in Sweden.

Stram Kurs has not been a part of Danish Parliament since the 2019 election.

The verdict

Two old videos — one from 2018 and one from 2020 — have been shared to falsely claim that Denmark's Prime Minister was confronted by a Pakistani Muslim in 2024. The two videos are unrelated to the recent attack on Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.