Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Jens Otto Krag
Summary
Jens Otto Krag (ˈjens ˈʌtsho ˈkhʁɑˀw; 15 September 1914 – 22 June 1978) was a Danish politician who served as prime minister of Denmark from 1962 to 1968 and from 1971 to 1972, and as leader of the Social Democrats from 1962 to 1972. He was president of the Nordic Council in 1971.
Krag was born in Randers, Jutland, on 15 September 1914, into the impoverished family of a tobacconist. He attended the local gymnasium, and as a teenager joined the Social Democratic Youth of Denmark, the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party. In 1933, Krag began studying economics at the University of Copenhagen. During this period he emerged as an active journalist and teacher in the labour movement, and became acquainted with the leadership of the Social Democrats and the trade unions.
He received his degree in 1940, the same year that Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany. During the German occupation, Krag worked as a civil servant in a Danish government agency and became a leading economic advisor to the labour movement, as well as a protégé of prominent social democrat and future prime minister Hans Hedtoft.
In 1944, Krag began his political career as the secretary of a program committee set up by the Social Democratic Party, as it prepared itself for politics in the postwar period. Under his leadership, the committee developed the new party program "Denmark of the Future" (Fremtidens Danmark), which presented proposals for nationalisation and notions of Keynesian economics and economic democracy. Despite the party's poor performance in the first postwar election in 1945, Krag and the new party program of the Social Democrats achieved notoriety in Danish politics.
Krag was elected to Parliament (Folketing) in 1947 and was appointed Minister of Commerce. He supported the strengthening of the Danish military and Danish membership of NATO in 1949.
In 1950 Krag resigned from Parliament partially due to a conflict with Vilhelm Buhl and H. C. Hansen and, in order to become more fluent in the English language and see more of the world, requested a position at the Danish embassy in the United States.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.